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One of the best programs coming out of the New Deal was the Federal Writers Project, which became famous for producing guidebooks to the different parts of the country. As the
Columbia Journalism Reviewexplains, even with more than a little exceptionalist jingo to its work, the FWP produced reporting that filled in enormous gaps in the country s understanding of itself, including interviews with still-living people who were once enslaved.
The guidebooks weren’t the end of the project’s output: it commissioned hundreds of other works, from oral histories to ethnographies and collections of folklore. One staffer went on assignment to Puerto Rico, reporting back on the rise of fascism there. In Wisconsin, members of the Oneida Nation were employed to record the language and history of their community. In the course of their guidebook work, writers in various states spoke with formerly enslaved people, and their interviews inspired a separate, broader in
The enduring lessons of a New Deal writers project
In 1937, Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black life in his hometown of Washington, DC from the district’s early status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade through the present-day effects of disenfranchisement and segregation. “In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant,” Brown wrote. “Social compulsion forces many who would naturally be on the side of civic fairness into hopelessness and indifference.”