Research Guides: Juneteenth : Slave Narratives

What is a slave narrative?

A slave narrative is defined as "an account of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally." The tradition dates back to approximately 1760 and continued until slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, at which time 50 or more former slaves created book-length accounts of their lives.

The largest-scale collection of narratives by former slaves occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s when the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) gathered more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery as part of the Works Projects Administration or WPA.

Andrews, W. L. (2018, July 6). Slave narrative. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/slave-narrative

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
This digital collection from the Library of Congress contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).

Slave Narratives of Emancipation

Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Print Book) by Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville (Eds)
Publication Date: 1991
Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery...The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored 'contraband camps', as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and, in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor—former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest.
Slave Narratives after Slavery (Ebook) by William L. Andrews (Editor)
After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves continued to write about their experience of enslavement and their upward struggle to realize the promise of freedom and citizenship. Slave Narratives After Slavery reprints five of the most important and revealing first-person narratives of slavery and freedom published after 1865.
A Slave No More (Print Book) by David W. Blight, Wallace Turnage, and John Washington
In the stories of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a rich new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.