Prairie View College Oral Histories: Voices of the Formerly Enslaved

In the 1930s, students at Prairie View State Normal & Industrial College, under the direction of the college’s registrar and Arts and Sciences director, John Brother Cade, participated in a project to interview 229 formerly enslaved individuals from 17 states in the United States, as well as Indian Territory and Canada. Nearly early 70 years since the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, many of these individuals experienced the tail end of slavery as an institution in America, and this project aimed to capture their voices, experiences, and the hardships that they faced in the early years of their lives. Students sought out information regarding food, clothing, housing facilities, quality of life, epistemology, family, and treatment, to capture the perspective of formerly enslaved individuals and the institution of slavery. This dataset, whose fields were extracted from the documents in this archival collection housed at Southern University, compiles key pieces of information these ex-slaves shared with Prairie View students.