The Commons

We Mourn for All We Do Not Know

The Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives provide a rare window into Black American heritage, Clint Smith wrote in March.

I am a 63-year-old white woman. Having read some of the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives in college, I have known about them my entire adult life. And yet I was brought up short by a statistic in Clint Smith’s article: At the time the narratives were compiled, in the mid-1930s, there were more than 100,000 living Americans who had been born into slavery. My mother, born in 1934, is healthy and active at 86. The realization that her life overlapped even briefly with the lives of so many formerly enslaved people underscores Smith’s observation that, “in the scope