Olaudah Equiano composed the first-ever slave autobiography as a freed slave living in England. His autobiography, The Life of Gustavus Vassa, became a phenomenal best-seller in its time, both in England and America, and fueled a young but growing anti-sl
From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to
". . . I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of
Andy Nelson, 76, is a leader of a small rural settlement of negroes known as Moser Valley, ten miles east of Fort Worth on State highway #15. He was born a slave to J. Wolf, on a Denton County farm, and his mother belonged to Dr. John Barkswell, who owned
My mother died when I was real small, and about a year after that my father died. Master Holmes [Colbert] told us children not to cry, that he and Miss Betsy would take good care of us. The did, too. They took us in their house with them and looked after
Although the records of the family were destroyed by a fire years ago, Mrs. King places her age at about eighty years. Her husband, Albert King, was the first Negro policeman employed on the Toledo police force. She was the first colored juvenile officer
North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920" documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
