Federal Writers' Project (FWP),a depression-era New Deal program that employed a number of African American writers and collected significant black folklore and autobiography. When President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) began hiring out-of-work writers to develop a Guide to America series, the “Black Cabinet” or “Brain Trust” of John Davis, William Hastie, and Robert Weaver pressed WPA director Harold Ickes for an Office of Negro Affairs to promote both equal employment of African American writers and black studies. Black representation in the FWP's workforce remained token—only 106 of 4,500 workers in 1937—and inconsistent, with some southern states refusing black applications in order not to spend money for “separate facilities.” Yet Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida (as well as New York and Illinois) had active black units, and through the project several African American writers of stature earned necessary income at critical phases of their careers. Richard Wright, quitting his post office job to write copy for the project in Chicago and New York, found time to write Native Son (1940); Zora Neale Hurston finished three novels while doing field work in Florida; and young Ralph Ellison in research on trials and folklore discovered what he called the “density” of black experience. The project also employed Claude McKay, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, and Frank Yerby.
Beyond his limited success at influencing FWP personnel decisions, Negro Affairs director Sterling A. Brown was able to intercept biased material intended for the Guide series and to instigate important new field studies of black subjects. In Chicago, Katherine Dunham surveyed cults, including the Nation of Islam, and Arna Bontemps supervised The Cavalcade of the American Negro in conjunction with the city's 1940 Diamond Jubliee. The Georgia project's Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (1940) sought cultural parallels between Africa and the Sea Islands. Similar studies remained fragmentary or unpublished when Congress ended support in 1939, although the writers' project survived on the state level until 1943 and some data resurfaced in later texts.
Two African American collections distinguish the project's overall work. The Negro in Virginia (1940), a treasury of folklore and history supervised by Roscoe Lewis, won praise from The Saturday Review as “one of the most valuable contributions yet made to the American negro's history.” The project's greatest monument is the Slave Narrative Collection, interviews and testimonies from more than two thousand of one hundred thousand former slaves living in the 1930s. Charles S. Johnson had initiated such research at Fisk University in 1929, and his student Lawrence Reddick launched a pilot program for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1934. Two years later, white folklore editor John Lomax, on loan from the Library of Congress, designed a standard questionnaire for the American Guide Manual. Brown, along with Lomax's successor Benjamin Botkin, later refined this questionnaire, which was used in seventeen states by dozens of FWP workers. From ten thousand pages of manuscript, Botkin excerpted Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945), remarking that the exslaves’ stories possess “an essential truth and humanity that surpasses as it supplements history and literature.”
Bibliography
- Norman Yetman, “The Background of the American Slave Collection,” American Quarterly
19 (Fall 1967): 534–553. - Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts, 1977
Craig Howard White
