"They Had Lives:" Life Stories from the Withheld Ohio Slave Narratives

Abstract

Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers’ Slave Narrative project conducted thousands of interviews with surviving ex-slaves across seventeen states. However, not all narratives had been returned for inclusion in the federal project, including twenty-eight from Ohio which languished in the state archives. The federal project sought to capture a collective story of slavery; however, what it failed to capture was the individual, whose life story when developed, extended beyond enslavement. They Had Lives: Life Stories from the Withheld Ohio Narratives follows those individuals from their time in enslavement, through their migration to the north, until their final days residing in Ohio in the years after participating in the writers’ project. From estate records, census returns, military documents, vital records, and a variety of other sources, the individual begins to emerge, and a change arises in the intellectual understanding of slavery and the African American experience.