Slavery Time When I Was Chillun - Softcover

Hurmence, Belinda

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26 ratings by Goodreads

9780399231940: Slavery Time When I Was Chillun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399231943 ISBN 13: 9780399231940

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 1997

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Twelve oral histories of former slaves selected from the more than 2000 interviewed as part of the Slave Narratives of the Library of Congress for the Works Progess Administration in 1936

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Gr. 8^-12. This disturbing collection of slave narratives raises as many questions about how we know history as it does about the atrocity of slavery and its aftermath. Hurmence has selected and edited 12 oral histories from the more than 2,000 recorded in 1936 for the Works Progress Administration of the Library of Congress. People in their eighties remember what it was like to be a child under slavery. They remember brutality, wrenching family separation, hard labor; some also remember kindly masters, happy times, and the security of food and shelter. But, as with all such interviews, how reliable are these accounts? How much do they reflect the subject's desire to please the interviewer? How much were they edited by the interviewer, who recorded with pencil and paper? Do they reflect the nostalgia of old people during the grinding poverty of the Great Depression and after a lifetime of struggle looking back to slavery? And why did Hurmence select these 12 and not others? She raises some of these issues in her introduction, which will stimulate classroom discussion, especially when compared with the very different accounts by younger, militant ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Hazel Rochman

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