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'Where was the Lord?': On Jefferson Davis' birthday, 9 slave testimonies
The voices of five men and four women, once held in human bondage, interviewed in Alabama in 1937.
Lyman, Brian http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/in-depth/news/2019/06/03/alabama-state-holiday-jefferson-davis-birthday-where-lord-9-slave-testimonies/3740398002/
Publisher: Montgomery Advertiser
Date Written: 03/06/2019
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
Testimonies of several victims of slavery collected in the 1930s tell of separation from family, overwork, and abuse.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
From 1936 to 1938, the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency, sent workers throughout the South to collect oral histories from survivors of slavery, eventually conducting more than 2,000 interviews, including at least 129 in Alabama. The workers were not necessarily trained interviewers, and scholars have noted that the race of the interviewer often had a major effect on the answers the former slaves gave. But the testimonies preserve the voices of those who experienced a hell that Davis and other white southerners were willing to destroy the country to protect....
Delia Garlic, Montgomery:
I was growed up when the war come, and I was a mother before it closed. Babies was snatched from their mother’s breasts and sold to speculators. Children was separated from sisters and brother and never saw each other again.
Course they cry; you think they not cry when they was sold like cattle? I could tell you about it all day, but even then you couldn’t guess the awfulness of it.
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