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Paper short abstract:

American folkloristics practice with its emphasis on public scholarship owes a debt to the overlooked research of African American HBCU scholars who collected narratives of the formerly enslaved in the 1920s, ten years before the New Deal. This paper acknowledges their work and traces its influence.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1920s, African American scholars based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), most notably Lawrence Reddick and Ophelia Settle Egypt, began to collect personal narratives from Americans who had survived enslavement. These were for the most part unpublished and overlooked but Reddick brought his work to Harry Hopkins, a New Deal advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, who in turn took the idea to Washington. There, Ben Botkin, director of the Federal Writers Project, launched and directed the Slave Narrative project, the most extensive collection of testimonies of the formerly enslaved in American history, edited the multivolume publication series, and published his own anthology, Lay My Burden Down. This was also the first major project of what Botkin termed “applied folklore,” which has led to the distinctive practice of folkloristics in the U.S., later called “public sector folklore” by Archie Green. This paper argues that the reason U.S. folklore practice looks as it does, with fully half the work taking place outside of universities, is because of the forgotten research of these African American scholars working outside the mainstream of predominantly white American research universities, of which many had themselves been alumni before establishing careers at the HBCUs. We must re-examine the politics that kept this work unpublished and unknown. The obscuring of Black scholarship is a major shortcoming of our teaching and training in the history of American folkloristics.