Mighty Rough Times, I tell You: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Tennessee

In 1929, the Social Sciences Department at Fisk Universityin Nashville, Tennessee, began recording the oral histories of former slaves. During the mid—1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook a similar effort, ultimately compiling more than two thousand interviews and ten thousand pages of material in seventeen states. In this volume, thirty—six former slaves living in Tennessee recount what it was like to live under the yoke. Tennessee was not a large slaveholding state compared with ...