of Congress, is a unit of the Public Activities Program of the
Community Service Programs of the Work Projects Administration for the
District of Columbia. According to the Project Proposal (WPA Form 301),
the purpose of the Project is to "collect, check, edit, index, and
otherwise prepare for use WPA records, Professional and Service
Projects."

The Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress Project processes material
left over from or not needed for publication by the state Writers'
Projects. On file in the Washington office in August, 1939, was a large
body of slave narratives, photographs of former slaves, interviews with
white informants regarding slavery, transcripts of laws, advertisements,
records of sale, transfer, and manumission of slaves, and other
documents. As unpublished manuscripts of the Federal Writers' Project
these records passed into the hands of the Library of Congress Project
for processing; and from them has been assembled the present collection
of some two thousand narratives from the following seventeen states:
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky,
Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia[1].

[Footnote 1: The bulk of the Virginia narratives is still in the state
office. Excerpts from these are included in _The Negro in Virginia_,
compiled by Workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects
Administration in the State of Virginia, Sponsored by the Hampton
Institute, Hastings House, Publishers, New York, 1940. Other slave
narratives are published in _Drums and Shadows_, Survival Studies among
the Georgia Coastal Negroes, Savannah Unit, Georgia Writers' Project,
Work Projects Administration, University of Georgia Press, 1940. A
composite article, "Slaves," based on excerpts from three interviews,
was contributed by Elizabeth Lomax to the _American Stuff_ issue of
_Direction_, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1935.]

The work of the Writers' Unit in preparing the narratives for deposit in
the Library of Congress consisted principally of arranging the
manuscripts and photographs by states and alphabetically by informants
within the states, listing the informants and illustrations, and
collating the contents in seventeen volumes divided into thirty-three
parts. The following material has been omitted: Most of the interviews
with informants born too late to remember anything of significance
regarding slavery or conce