Black Voices from the Archive
The testimonies of formerly enslaved people, collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project, provide a unique archive for historians.
‘Come on in and sit down’, Oscar Felix told his interviewer, Edmund Burke:
It makes me feel good to see the young people of our race trying to put things down in record fashion. That’s our trouble as a race. We live from day to day, forgetting the past and not worrying about the future.
Burke, employed by the Federal Writers’ Project in Louisiana, spoke with Felix, a formerly enslaved man, in the late 1930s. It was a unique moment in American history: the ‘roaring 20s’ were a distant memory; breadlines were long, unemployment was high, and the Great Depression had superseded America’s traditional scepticism around the concept of welfare. With tensions rising in Europe the future looked increasingly uncertain, and it was in this context that America looked to the past to understand who it was in the present.
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