Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938

In 1854, faced with the threat of yet another brutal beating, a fifty-year-old slave in Mason County, Kentucky, decided to try to escape. He joined the hundreds of other fugitive slaves fleeing across the Ohio River and north to Canada on the Underground Railroad. After his arrival in Toronto he discarded his master's surname (Parker), renamed himself Francis Fedric, and married an Englishwoman. In 1857, he traveled with his wife to Great Britain, where he lectured on behalf of the antislavery cause and published two versions of his life story. Together the two works present a mesmerizing and distinct perspective on slavery in the South. Long forgotten and never before published in the United States, Fedric's narratives, collected here for the first time, are certain to take their rightful place alongside the most recognizable accounts in the canon of slave memoirs.

CLARK CO.(Mayme Nunnelley)Most Kentucky superstitions are common to all classes of people because the Negroes originally obtained most of their superstitions from the white and because the superstitions of most part of Kentucky are in almost all cases not recent invention but old survivals from a time when they were generally accepted by all Germanic peoples and by all Indo-Europeans. The only class of original contributions made by the Negroes to our stock of superstitions is that of the hoodoo or voodoo signs which are brought from Africa by the ancestors of the present colored people of America. On the arrival of the negro in America, his child like mind was readily receptive to the white man's superstitions. The Black slave and servants in Kentucky. . . .

Reproduction of the original: Narrative of the Life of J.D Green... by J.D Green

Fictionalized account of slave life in Kentucky.

From 1936 to 1938, the Works Projects Administration (WPA) commissioned writers to collect the life histories of former slaves. This work was compiled under the Franklin Roosevelt administration during the New Deal and economic relief and recovery program. Each entry represents an oral history of a former slave or a descendant of a former slave and his or her personal account of life during slavery and emancipation. These interviews were published as type written records that were difficult to read. This new edition has been enlarged and enhanced for greater legibility. No library collection in Kentucky would be complete without a copy of Kentucky Slave Narratives.