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David Kipen is pretty sure the idea for a modern-day Federal Writers Project came to him at dawn.
It was early in the devastating spring of 2020 and the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts
was thinking of his friends who’d died of COVID-19, a handful of the more than 578,000 people killed by the virus in the United States to date. He was thinking of his brilliant creative writing students at UCLA, deprived of internships and jobs. Of decimated small-town newspapers and fellow writers who’d been laid off. And he was thinking of the cosmic rifts dividing the nation.
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The project’s managing editor Gillian B. White and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith talk about filling in the pages of Black history with stories that have gone unknown for too long.
With the recognition of Black History Month, many organizations are focusing on Black stories. The Atlantic’s Inheritance project is a more permanent dedication to Black history, reaching beyond just the month of February. The multi-year project will piece together suppressed Black narratives and use them to better understand America’s history and future.
“We’re not just focusing on history in the rearview…we are talking about the ways that Black people have affected history and affected change in ways that are evident now and will impact the future.” Gillian B. White, The Atlantic
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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