Minnie Stonestreet’s WPA Slave Narrative

The south’s history is plagued with the reality that it has tarnished the lives of many human beings. Southern whites have berated, abused, and killed many just for the benefit of themselves and their economic prosperity. The enslavement of African Americans caused a war that literally tore families apart. After slavery was abolished, whites found loopholes in the Constitution so that they did not have to be equal to blacks. The Jim Crow Laws came about from the previous Black Codes that were in effect during Reconstruction. These laws upheld the inequality between blacks and whites, giving the whites justification for the continuation of keeping the former slaves in a child-like disposition in which they had to depend on their former masters and white men in order to survive. With these laws still in effect, the black people moved into the Great Depression. Despite the fact that many people were in a bad situation and had very little, most blacks were in a more desperate situation because they went into the depression with nothing but the roof over their heads and the little bit of money that they may have saved up from working. Many of these blacks depended on work from white men to get money in order to buy food and necessities, but with the economy being in so much trouble, many of the employers had to let go of some of their employees. The first employees to be let go were usually black men and women. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president at this time, came up with the New Deal in the 1930’s that would generate an economic comeback that would help the United States get back on its feet. One of the programs that he implemented during this New Deal was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This was a way to put workers back into the work force. Within the WPA was the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP). One of the best assignments for the Federal Writer’s Project was having people do Ex-Slave Narratives. These were done primarily in the south because the south was the only place where former slaves were still living since the northern states had emancipated their slaves years before the south did. Georgia’s narratives were focused mainly in north, central, and east Georgia. Minnie Stonestreet was one of the interviewers in Washington, Georgia. Her interview with Wesley Anthony touched on the aspects of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Depression.1

Minnie Stonestreet was born in 1890 with no recollection of slavery except maybe some of the stories that could have been passed down from her parents. When she worked on this Ex-Slave Narrative, she was more than likely doing it for her economic welfare instead of using it as a way to learn about her inherent past. Getting a job during the 1930’s was a hard task, and getting one with the federal government was an even harder one. Minnie Stonestreet probably got her job with the WPA because she was a secretary and probably had some ties with the local government as one of the administrator’s secretary. She conveys Wesley Anthony, the man she interviewed, as a sincere, old black man that seemed to remain inferior to even a white woman. She portrays his life experience as rather subtle with no brutality and harshness. One of the main problems with these narratives is the likelihood of ex-slaves telling whites what they did wrong and how cruel they were. With the times being so harsh and the blacks still under the scrutiny of Jim Crow, blacks were not as pervasive with their narratives as they would have been if they were talking to someone of their own race. Throughout the narrative, Ms. Stonestreet doesn’t directly deal with the issues of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Depression. Her narrative tends to skim the layer without actually breaking the ice. Little did she realize that this narrative would later be a gateway to the discussions of the severity of slavery and the situations that slaves encountered. It seems that her want to do this narrative was far less important than her financial need to do this narrative. She wasn’t rude, but it was apparent that she was in a situation that was a little uncomfortable. The whole idea of a white woman being in the same room with a black man was very uncommon during this time. If Minnie would have been married, it’s less likely that she would have taken this job in the first place because her husband probably would not trust a black man with his white wife. There are contrastable things between Ms. Stonestreet and Mr. Anthony. Ms. Stonestreet had her own office, which was probably in the middle of town with a nice view. Mr. Anthony was a laborer and preacher. By laborer, he meant that he took any odd jobs that he could to be able to make any amount of money that he could. Mostly he worked on farms for white people who would allow his services at such an old age. Ms. Stonestreet wasn’t even born until almost a quarter of a decade after slavery was stopped; thus giving her very little knowledge of the situation that Mr. Anthony went through. Mr. Anthony was born during the time of slavery with the assumption that it was only a few years before the Civil War was begun. Even though times were tough, Ms. Stonestreet probably was not worried if she would have the necessities that she needed to go about her life. However, Mr. Anthony was probably a little weary about where his next meal would come from and how he would afford it. Mr. Anthony was well over eighty years old, but he still managed to get up every morning before dawn just to go to work to make a measly amount of money. More than likely, Ms. Stonestreet would not have to be worried about having to work until she died. After President Roosevelt instituted the Social Security Act, there really was no worry as to whether she would die working or not. Mr. Anthony began his personal slave narrative when he was born into slavery. 2

Jefferson Davis once said, “[Y]ou cannot transform the Negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.” Slavery in the south was the center of the southern economy because without slaves the south would not have generated as much revenue as it did during this time. Jefferson Davis advocates the mentality that slaves are not smart enough to go out in the world and that they are, in a sense, childlike. The mindset of slaveholders in the south was that their slaves were children and that they, as masters, needed to be a paternal figure to them so that they could be directed in the proper direction so that they do not do anything that would be considered naïve and adolescent. In essence, the slaveholders felt that they were doing what was right by punishing their “children.” Punishments included whippings, beatings, and even lynching. However, there is an aspect of slavery that is often overlooked, the realization that all slaves were not part of a vast plantation with hundreds of slaves. The most common occurrence in Georgia was a small group of slaves, ranging from one slave to five slaves. Out of 41,084 slaveholders, 20,057 had only one to five slaves. Only 211 slaveholders had 100 to 499 slaves, and only eight slaveholders had 500 or more slaves. Slavery was not alike across the board. Things were different according to who the master was and how harshly he punished. Many of the ex-slaves that were interviewed reported that they were not really mistreated. Some of these slaves referred to slavery as being better than fending for themselves. The problem with this statement is that is was made during the time of the Great Depression. To these ex-slaves, slavery may have been better than trying to find work during the Panic of 1929. The reason they felt that this was an accurate statement was because during slavery they had food and a secure roof over their heads. However, during the Depression, they were not sure if they would be able to afford food, pay their bills, or maintain the necessary upkeep of their houses. Minnie Stonestreet’s interviewee, Wesley Anthony, was also caught between this same rock and hard place. He was uncertain as to where his next job would come from and whether he would make enough money to support himself and his wife. During slavery, men and women worked from sun up until sun down knowing that their hard day’s labor would pay off with the food that would be given to them. Mr. Anthony was sworn is as the first mail carrier in Wilkes County by his former master and a few other men. Unlike many other slaves, Wesley Anthony was able to work without being scrutinized too much by his owner because his owner had a lot of trust in him. Labor was easier to do when there were no overseers or drivers there to watch over the slaves’ labor. The slaves lived in such fear of slave drivers and overseers that they would mess up because of being scared of what would happen to them if they did mess up. It was not uncommon for the drivers and overseers to be more critical and harsh than the owner would be. The drivers and overseers did not want to risk losing their jobs, so they felt any wrong thing deserved punishment. However, there were not many plantations that required these drivers and overseers; thus, leading historians to the conclusion that not all slaveholders were brutes. Mr. Anthony revered his master. After the Civil War was over, Mr. Anthony’s master told all of his slaves that they were free, but the slaves stayed on with him because they didn’t want to leave him since he had been such a kind master. Mr. Anthony kept close ties with his master after he was freed. His master was the one who got him the job working as the mail carrier, which he continued to do for ten years. Perhaps Mr. Anthony did not want to tell of hard times that may have occurred while he was under the ownership of Mr. John Anderson because of fear that his accusations may come back to haunt him in the future. What may make one skeptical about his love for his former master is that his master paid $1,000 for Mr. Anthony’s mother. The reason that this appears a little sketchy is that most slaveholders who have to buy their slaves for an extreme sum of money are usually cruel because they want the best work out of them. Despite the efforts of the Confederate Troops, they failed to win the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln put a stop to slavery.3

Jim Crow Laws were reproductions of the old Slave Codes. They limited blacks in such a way that they may as well have still been enslaved. This was the white man’s way of still having control over blacks. These laws limited blacks’ education, legal rights, and other things that they should have been allowed to do. The south was not the only one to hold prejudice against blacks. The north was also held accountable for not extending the same rights and services to blacks as they did whites. Blacks were not allowed in certain restaurants, public facilities, churches, and the list goes on. Whites also found loopholes in which they could get around blacks voting during the presidential elections. It seems that whites still upheld the belief that blacks should remain ignorant and uneducated because they are not worthy of building themselves up from oppression. This explains why the educational facilities were run down and had used textbooks. As it was in slavery, if a black man even talked to a white woman, he could get into a lot of trouble, possibly imprisoned or lynched. Interracial marriages were illegal, and while W.E.B. Du Bois agreed that interracial marriages were against his beliefs, he didn’t think that the government should be the deciding factor as to whether two people should be able to marry or not. The Jim Crow Laws picked out ridiculous laws to prohibit black people from advancing. They weren’t able to go to parks that were maintained by the city because that would be a white only park. In mental hospitals it would be arranged so that blacks and whites wouldn’t room together, and to top it all off, blacks couldn’t be buried in the same ground as a white person. This is only a small portion of what the slaves had to deal with while they were going into the Great Depression.4

For the interviewees of the slave narratives, they lived through two trifling periods in the south: slavery and the Great Depression. To many people it would seem that if you don’t have anything, then you couldn’t lose anything. However, this was not the case during the Panic of 1929. When the stock market first fell, it was not as dramatic as it became as the years went on. As the months and years went by and things didn’t get better, it then became a more confirmed reality that something had to be done in order to boost the economy to what was a previous state of economic euphoria for some. It appears that the Depression worked through a trickle-down economy: if the rich didn’t have money to employ the poor, then the poor didn’t have any money at all. The affects of the Great Depression on the black population were possibly worse than it was for anyone else. Many blacks were barely scraping by, using the money that they made working for white men to afford the necessities in order to live. After the Civil War, blacks were grateful to get the low jobs that included the dirty work that no one else was willing to do. During the Great Depression, blacks were ousted from those jobs, and they were given to a white man because the white man was more important. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program was instituted as a way to get people on their feet, white people, that is. The New Deal didn’t really work in favor of the blacks unless they were employed by the military or had some extraordinary circumstantial reason why they should benefit off this program. Many of the blacks that were interviewed for the Ex-Slave Narratives told of their love for FDR because of all the things he had done for them, when, in fact, he really hadn’t done anything for them. Minnie Stonestreet got her job with the WPA only because she knew people who could get her this job. She not only did interviews with former slaves, but she also wrote a book about her town and county: The Story of Washington-Wilkes. During this time, the New Deal was implementing a lot of things because people were desperate for jobs. The Federal Writer’s Project was not only concerned with ex-slaves but also with town and counties. This is saying that of all the other people who could have gotten a job working for the WPA, Minnie Stonestreet worked on two separate projects instead of just one. However unfair it may be to the whites, it was even more unfair to the blacks because the blacks were searching for any kind of job just to keep the roof over their heads. Wesley Anthony farmed for white men around Washington and Danburg to earn the money that he needed. He was turned away from many jobs because people felt that he was not capable of doing the hard labor that they needed him to do since he was so old and fragile. His philosophy was that he was trained to be strong and to keep going. He felt that people younger than he was didn’t have any work ethics and that they were a bunch of idolaters. Despite his age, he still fought to keep working. He was at one time receiving government old age pension of a measly five dollars a month, but the government cut him off and said that they needed to help other people who needed the money. It can be assumed that they cut him off because there were whites out there that needed his pension. It can also be assumed that these whites probably hadn’t worked as hard or done as much manual labor as he had. In essence, they probably didn’t deserve the old age pension half as much as Wesley Anthony did. Minnie Stonestreet got to sit up in her office typing out narratives. All she had to do was ask a bunch of question in what would probably take about a couple of hours, and then she had to find a way to piece it all together so that it ran together like a transcript. After she finished piecing it together, she had to type it. For her to do this, the government probably paid her a pretty decent sum. However, for all the laundry washing, ironing, cleaning, and manual labor that black women and men did during the Great Depression, they got paid next to nothing, but many of them didn’t complain, they were just grateful for what they did receive.5

When the white planter class tried to validate slavery, they said that blacks were the descendents of Ham. As the story goes, Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan. Noah’s curse was that Canaan’s descendents were to be slaves to the descendents of Japheth and Shem. Even today parts of the south still have this ideology that blacks aren’t equal to whites. In some ways they’re not because society has left them so far behind economically, educationally, and socially. However, the Works Progress Administration tried to reach out by use of the Federal Writer’s Project’s Ex-Slave Narratives. Maybe by having a few white people talk to a few former slaves, these whites can get to know what really happened. It was a way for whites to get in touch with their past. For years white southerners have been avoiding the fact that their history is tainted with the reality that they committed these treacherous crimes that affected so many lives. Racism still plagues the south, especially in rural areas. From personal experience, many people kept their children out of the public school system and put them into private schools because they felt threatened by the black to white ratio. Perhaps there is some truth that the public schools just didn’t have the advancement necessary to train a child for college, but after researching for this paper, it can be assumed that public schools are so far behind because of whites keeping blacks from having a proper education. These narratives help to illustrate how life was back during the slave days and how they were during the Great Depression. Historians have researched these topics extensively and thoroughly and have come out with many different opinions. However, there is nothing better than first hand experience to help historians understand these times completely. FDR may have only set this up as a way to get people working again, but these narratives have carried over and are useful to many historians. When reading Ms. Minnie Stonestreet’s narrative, one might just read it as an ordinary article, but when a historian reads this narrative, he digs beneath the surface and finds what others do not. The social and economic differences are so apparent in Ms. Stonestreet’s narrative that it doesn’t take a historian to figure out that there are two different worlds colliding in one room. The extent in which she describes Mr. Anthony’s attire has so much detail that it makes one wonder if she is there to criticize him or there to hold an interview. It can only be imagined that Ms. Stonestreet is dressed in a modern outfit that would be suited for a 49 year old lower to middle middle-class secretary. It appears that she skims over the basics of slavery without going too much into detail for fear that she might ask the wrong question. Despite a few discrepancies, it doesn’t seem as though Ms. Stonestreet is only there for the money. She did do a few things out of the goodness of her heart for Mr. Anthony while he was there. She agreed to take his picture, which was a stipulation for his going to the interview, and she also extended her apologies when she heard that Mr. Anthony’s son had died. Ms. Stonestreet did a great thing for society by writing for the FWP, and Mr. Anthony did a great thing by going and telling his life’s story. However, these two are not the only ones who contributed to the Ex-Slave Narratives. The Narratives, collectively, are parts of history that survive for later generations to experience. They can know from a first hand point of view what it was like during slavery, Jim Crow, and the Depression in the south.