Mighty Rough Times I Tell You: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Tennessee

In 1929, the Social Sciences Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, began recording the oral histories of former slaves. During the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook a similar effort, ultimately compiling more than two thousand interviews and ten thousand pages of material in seventeen states. In this volume, thirty-six former slaves living in Tennessee recount what it was like to live under the yoke. Tennessee was not a large slaveholding state compared with othe…