During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers' Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration, sent out-of-work writers to seventeen states to conduct interviews with former enslaved people. The writers collected over 2,000 narratives, and the result was the Slave Narrative Collection. Seventy years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, these narratives allow a glimpse into freedpeople's memories of slavery. They offer a first-hand account of enslaved people experiences with the institution of slavery.

Despite the wealth of information these narratives provide, researchers should approach them cautiously. First, these interviews were held more than seventy years after the legal end to slavery. Most of the former enslaved people interviewed would have experienced slavery as young children, and memory is not infallible. In addition, interviewers received instructions to reproduce the dialects of the interviewees. Unfortunately, in an attempt to allow the former enslaved peoples' voices to tell their own stories, the writers, immersed in racial stereotypes, often exaggerated broken English. Finally, during the Federal Writers' Project, former enslaved people responded differently to white interviewers than they did to African American interviewers. Many of the former enslaved people who were interviewed believed that if they portrayed slavery negatively, they would upset the white interviewers and would not receive the government financial aid they needed during the Great Depression. All of these problematic issues of memory and race should remind readers that the Slave Narrative Collection is a historic document that reflects the 1930s as much as it does the 1850s and 1860s. The narratives provide researchers wonderful information about the institution of slavery, but researchers must also be conscious of the setting in which the interviews took place.