The New Deal and Works Progress Administration

In the 1930s, the United States was in the grip of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Jobs were scarce, people were hungry, and the nation's lands and forests were in decline. To combat these harsh realities, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a 1933-1942 program that put young unemployed men to work developing and conserving natural resources. The men lived together in camps where they received medical care, food, and education, and a portion of their salaries went home to support their families. In Arizona, they battled soil erosion on grazing lands, built roads, and developed parks, including Petrified Forest National Park, Saguaro National Park, and South Mountain Park. At Grand Canyon, they built trails, roads, and buildings. Throughout the state's national forests, they constructed recreational facilities and improved the health of the woods. The magnitude of the work they accomplished is staggering, and their enduring contribution to the state is unquestionable.

The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected Oklahoma narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.