By David A. Taylor, Photo: Hampton University Archives, The Washington Post, July 19, 2022
For several days in June last year, I found myself driving through Virginia on the trail of undercover historians. I was working on a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, which had sent researchers across the state during the 1930s to talk with formerly enslaved Virginians. These historians, all of whom were Black, were undercover in the sense that had they been too obvious in their aim to expose the realities of slavery, they could have been harassed by local officials, had their funding slashed by Congress and been subjected to the ire of their White editors. They also worked at a time when Jim Crow still prevailed.
Their project was part of a national Black history initiative within the Federal Writers’ Project, which was established by the Works Progress Administration. That initiative, led by Howard University’s Sterling Brown, included a plan to interview thousands of formerly enslaved people across the South before they died. Brown entrusted one of the larger pieces of that effort to a dozen interviewers in Virginia, under the leadership of a bespectacled chemist named Roscoe Lewis.
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