The Negro Units of the Federal Writers’ Project and State Writers’ Projects (1935-1943)
The work of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was a program within the Works Project Administration, modelled in part on a Federal Emergency Relief Assistance (FERA) Project in 1934 designed by Lawrence Reddick. Reddick, a faculty at Kentucky State University, Fisk alum, and former student of Charles S. Johnson, proposed a government sponsored work program that would hire African American scholars during the Depression to document lives of formerly enslaved people in the U.S. While the FWP did not solely hire African Americans to document Black lives, this New Deal program did include collecting the life stories and interviews of African Americans, including the experiences of formerly enslaved people, at a time where that information was beginning to be valued. According to historian Norman Yetman, between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project hired about 4500 American writers to write about many aspects of American history and culture. Only approximately 106 of them were African Americans and many of their names need to be retrieved (Yetman 2001).
Although FWP records reveal that African Americans were virtually excluded from participation in the Writers’ Projects in several Southern states, in other states, opportunities for Black participation varied (Yetman 2001). FWP records show that prior to the official opening of the initiative the collection of slave interviews and narratives by the national headquarters of the FWP in 1937, a single Black employee in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, conducted occasional ex-slave interviews without explicit direction or apparent guidance from Washington before the collection of slave interviews and narratives was officially inaugurated by the national headquarters of the FWP in 1937 (Yetman 2001). A few were ethnographers, most of the interviewers were not trained beyond being taught to conduct interviews and take surveys. The uneven collection results often improved when interviewers worked within their own communities.
For Black writers, participation in the Federal Writers’ Project was inspired by the creativity and raised consciousnesses of the Harlem and DC renaissances, the 1920s HBCU research documenting the lives of formerly enslaved people, the constraints of segregation, the loss of jobs during the Great Depression, and disillusionment with the lack of progress toward equity for the masses of Black people. Through this initiative, several young Black writers systematically conducted interviews and ethnographies in Black communities across the country and their participation and contributions call for further archival exploration and study to tell a more complete story of their contributions to knowledge of African American culture. They worked on several programs within the FWP:
- The American Guide Series for the 48 states, Puerto Rico, Alaska territory and Washington, D.C.
- The Ex-Slave Interview Collection
- Life History and Folklore Collection
- America Eats (a food lore, culture and history project to which Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Arna Bontemps contributed.)
From 1936-1940, Professor and poet Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), was appointed Editor for Negro Affairs for the national FWP initiative to ensure the hiring of Black writers in the state programs of FWP, monitor the inclusion of African American history and culture, review the imagery and stories presented about African Americans in each state guide, and advocate for realistic and accurate Black histories. He also oversaw the work of the Negro Units, which were assigned to research Black history, arts, and folkways. His article, “The Negro in Washington”, in Washington: City and Capital (1937): 68-74 revealed an invisible, mostly oral history of African Americans in the Capital City from its beginnings.
While African Americans were heartened by Brown’s presence in this position and the FWP’s efforts to present a pluralistic American story, many others felt threatened. Because of the customary practices of racial segregation, white state FWP directors in many states, overrode or ignored Brown’s suggestions for procedures and edits for African American materials and minimized the spaces for presentation of research by Black people. Instead, they often eliminated or substituted stereotypical representations of Black people in place of the work by Black fieldworkers, upholding the existing racial hierarchy. In addition, the FBI opened files on Brown and many other members of the FWP.
At the end of 1938, Texas Democratic Congressman Martin Dies, the chairman of a newly formed House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC), attacked the programs of the FWP and the pluralistic story of America that it was seeking to present, with intimidating innuendo, fear mongering, and falsehoods. Seeking to stamp out Communism in government, Dies attempted to prevent the publication of the state guides still in manuscript. Although Dies failed to stop publication of the guides, he opened the door for the opponents of the FWP to dismantle the project in 1939, and to prevail in transferring funding responsibility to the states. To no surprise, many state programs continued to minimize the publication of African American research.
More archival research is needed to reveal the breadth of contributions by African Americans to the FWP. Although we have retrieved some information about a few of the African American researchers in several of the state FWP programs and the subsequent state writers’ programs, we do not have the names of all 106 of the African Americans who contributed field research in the state programs of the FWP. Because of the devaluation of Black people during segregation, keeping the names of Black fieldworkers in the project was of secondary importance. Often their research and writings were attributed to “workers”. A cursory effort to retrieve names of Black FWP participants is noted below.
During the FWP, a few state programs created Negro Units that were allowed to operate with varying levels of success and even were permitted to continue as part of their state programs, even though their full research often languished in archives, until recently reconstructed by interested scholars. In Illinois, New York, Louisiana, and Florida, African American fieldworkers explored the cultural traditions and sociocultural circumstances of local Black populations. These projects documented the Black history and lifeways of these communities, including some aspects of African American folkways. With a bias toward demonstrating the ability of Blacks to adapt to modern life as a counternarrative to stereotypes of African Americans, this research presents urban lifeways over cultural retentions. These include:
The Virginia Negro Studies Project
The Virginia Negro Studies Project, one of the most successful African American initiatives. Roscoe E. Lewis (1904-1961), a chemist turned historian at Hampton Institute, led a team of at least sixteen writers in a segregated unit who interviewed more than 300 formerly enslaved people. Lewis was credited with writing and shepherding The Negro in Virginia (1940) to publication, but it was the only volume envisioned by Brown that came to fruition during the initiative. Lewis had hoped to publish the exslave interviews as a volume but died before that happen. Among the Virginia Negro Studies Project team researchers were photographer Robert McNeill; Susie R. C. Byrd (conducted nearly 50 interviews of formerly enslaved persons in Petersburg, VA); Claude W. Anderson (conducted more than 25 interviews in Hampton and Matthew Court House); Thelma Dunston (Portsmouth, VA); Frances V. Green; David Hoggard; William T. Lee; George Majette; Faith Morris; Milton L. Randolph; Marietta Silver; Isaiah Volley; Jessie R. Williams; Emmy Wilson; and Maude Fuller. In 1994, folklorist Charles Perdue et al. published several of the slave interviews in Weevils in the Wheat.
The Florida Negro Writers’ Unit of the FWP
The Florida Negro Writers’ Unit of the FWP, also a segregated unit, which documented Black life in Florida. Zora Neale Hurston was the most famous member of this team and conducted some fieldwork for the unit, while also writing her own pieces. Among the other members of the Florida Negro Writers Unit were Alfred Farrell, a college graduate who taught English and French at Edward Waters College; Viola B. Muse, an Indiana University alumnae who wrote poetry and worked as a beautician; Pearl Randolph; Rachel Austin, Portia Thorington, Ruth Bolton, fieldworkers and secretaries for the initiative; Paul A. Diggs, a community organizer and civic leader; and Martin Richardson, noted as the primary compiler and author of the Florida Negro book project in 1937. However, James Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Pearl Randolph, and Viola Muse contributed to the volume. The 1937 edition was published in 1993, but other versions of the project remain in the unpublished papers including one which contains contributions from Hurston. Like in Georgia, Black interviewers tended to transcribe the interviews in standard English rather than in minstrel dialect. Their goal was to represent the racial uplift of the Black community in narratives that honored the historical circumstances but countered the stereotypes to point to the realities of the community.
Illinois Writers’ Project of the FWP
During the Illinois Writers’ Project of the FWP, Arna Bontemps and white American radical author Jack Conroy directed the Negro in Illinois project. On this team were some of the most promising Black writers, artists, and scholars of the Chicago Renaissance including Margaret Walker (1915-1998), Richard Wright, Frank Yerby (1916-1991), Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), Willard Motley, Lawrence Reddick, and Fenton Johnson. The job provided many of the authors to work on their own research and creative works. Regularly gathering together to share their writings in the Southside Writers’ Group, with frequent conversations with visitor Langston Hughes, these writers wrestled with ideas from the Popular Front, and the Chicago School of Sociology through discussions with John Gibbs St. Clair Drake (1911-1990) and Horace R. Cayton, Jr. (1903-1970) as they sought to theorize about Black life and reframe concepts concerning the folklore and folklife of African Americans through these critical lenses. This group set the tone for artistic vitality that nurtured the next generation of artists such as Gordon Parks (1912-2006) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) at Southside Community Arts Center. Among publications of interest to folklore studies arising from the research of this unit are:
Dolinar, Brian ed., The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers (2013) [Although the vast unpublished papers cover many Black communities throughout the state, including Southern Illinois, this published book almost exclusively emphasizes the culture and history of Black Chicago.]
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
St. Clair Drake wrote Churches and Voluntary Associations Among Negroes in Chicago, (1940), prepared for the Works Projects Administration.
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), a landmark study of race and urban life.
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy. They Seek a City (1945), a social history of southern Black migration to northern cities.
Negro Unit of the Louisiana FWP
The Negro Unit of the Louisiana FWP was led by initially by Lawrence Reddick while on Dillard’s faculty, and then by Marcus Christian. Housed at Dillard University in New Orleans, this sizable, segregated unit’s mission was to illustrate that Blacks had contributed to American history and so how oppression had shaped Black lives. Prioritizing local talent, among the members of Dillard’s team were James B. LaFourche, a free-lance journalist; Octave Lilly, a high school teacher; Alice Ward Smith, a novelist; Homer McEwen, a social worker; Clarence Laws, a student; Robert McKinney, a writer, and Eugene Willman, a college graduate and laborer. From 1935-1937, John Gibbs St. Claire Drake (1911-1990), sociologist and anthropologist, interviewed churches in New Orleans with anthropologist, Allison Davis (1902-1983).
The Dillard writers covered such subjects as the daily life of slaves, slave resistance to both physical bondage and the idea of white superiority, black labor, religion, folklore, and entertainment, along with the more established areas of politics and elite culture.
The Dillard Unit offered a counternarrative to the Louisiana Writers’ Project publication, Gumbo Ya-Ya, which presented a beneficent view of slavery. These writings remain in the Dillard archive. The Negro in Louisiana (1942), a 1200 page manuscript, was never fully completed. Another manuscript, Black New Orleans, was also unfinished.
New York City Negro History Unit of the FWP
The New York City Negro History Unit of the FWP, was comprised of some writers who had been part of the Illinois Negro Unit. In New York City, they continued to explore and theorize about African Americans in an urbanizing environment with the influences of socialism, and sociology. Although a few members of this team had migrated to New York from the South, several were Caribbean migrants. Among the members contributing to this initiative were: Richard Wright, writer; Ralph Ellison, writer; Vincent Lushington “Roi” Ottley, a journalist; Claude McKay, a poet; Henry Lee Moon, a journalist and civil rights activist; Ted Poston, a journalist; Joel A. Rogers, a journalist; Ellen Tarry, a journalist; William Waring Cuney, poet; and Dorothy West, writer.
Publications from the work of this initiative offer challenges to interpretations of the stereotypes of Black people as “folk” based in the realities of their existences:
Richard Wright, 12 Million Voices (1941)
Roi Ottley, The Negro in New York (1967)
Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming (1943)
South Carolina Negro Unit of the FWP
The experiences of the South Carolina Negro Unit of the FWP were more typical of the way the work by African Americans in the Deep South was treated. White editors disregarded the work of the ten Black researchers and writers and disregarded most of the materials produced by this team except for a tiny bit used in one chapter of the state guide, entitled “The Negroes” that upheld the standard racial hierarchy. Attempting to correct distortions and stereotypes of Black life and contributions, ten Black writers contributed toward a prospective Negro Guide to South Carolina that would tout the heritage and noteworthy accomplishment of Black South Carolinians. Their research resides in the Digital Collections of the South Carolina Libraries. The unit was led by Elise Ford Jenkins, a Columbia, S.C. college graduate whose African American family oral history claims direct descendancy from George Washington. Among the African American team members for this unit were: Samuel Addison, Jr., Lillian Buchanan, Eva Fitchett, Mildred Hare, Augustus Ladson, Laura Lee Middleton, Hattie Mobley, Robert Nelson, and Simmie Smith.
Other states or city programs hired small numbers of individuals to conduct research on African American history and culture.
Arkansas Writers’ Project
The Arkansas Writers’ Project hired two African Americans for their project, Samuel Shinkle Taylor (1886-1956), a civic leader noted for his detailed and careful interviews and Pernella Mae Center Anderson (1903-1980), a schoolteacher. Sponsored by theGreater Urban League of Little Rock, Taylor wrote drawing on Arkansas’ interviews, Survey of Negroes in Little Rock and North Little Rock (1941).
Georgia Writers’ Project
The Georgia Writers’ Project hired at least five African Americans to research Black life: Willie H. Cole, Ardella S. Dixon, Edwin Driskell, Louise Oliphant, and Minnie B. Ross. Both interviewers and interviewees were constrained by the racial hierarchy and power of white supremacy in segregation since Georgia was a stronghold of the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause. So, this group of fieldworkers had to navigate several of the conventions of documentation in order to facilitate Black people telling the truths of their experiences within and despite the oppressive situations of their lives. While these researchers did not have control of the state’s publications about African Americans, they were able to write up their interviews in standard English that countered stereotypical representations of their interviewees, rather than in minstrel English; and in doing so, preserved the integrity of the interviewees’ reminiscences despite a context that upheld stereotypes of African Americans as primitives incapable of civilization.
Nebraska Writers’ Project
The Nebraska Writers’ Project hired at least two African American researchers, Fred D. Dixon and Albert J. Burks. Dixon was particularly noted for his skillful interviews and the diversity of the Black community that he interviewed. Their interviews record memories of slavery and its ending, of African American migration to the state, and of African American life and culture in Omaha and throughout the state. Based significantly on the research of these men, The Omaha Urban League Community Center sponsored publication of The Negroes of Nebraska (1940). However, the city guide for Omaha, the city in Nebraska with the oldest and largest Black population remains unpublished due to Omaha’s complex and contentious history that includes race riots and lynchings, and considerable labor conflict.
Pittsburgh Writers’ Project
The Pittsburgh Writers’ Project hired three African American writers. For The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh (2004), Abram Thompson Hall, Jr. (1851-1951), a journalist who wrote chapters on folkways and with Fred Holmes, a chapter on the Shadow of the Plantation. Homer S. Brown (1896-1977), an attorney and judge, wrote the chapter on civil rights. Although the book was assembled by J. Ernest White in 1935, an antiracist white editor, the book was not published until Black historian Laurence Glasco assembled the pieces and edited a version for publication in 2004.