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Voices Out of Bondage
The U.S. Library of Congress’ remarkable collection of recorded interviews with former slaves
“I’m the oldest one that I know that’s living. But, still, I’m thankful to the Lord. Now, if, uh, if my master wanted send me, he never say, you couldn’t get a horse and ride. You walk, you know, you walk. And you be barefooted and collapse. That didn’t make no difference. You wasn’t no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn’t treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still I didn’t like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don’t like to say. And I won’t say a whole lot more.”
— Fountain Hughes in 1949, reflecting on his childhood in slavery
On 11 June 1949, Hermond Norwood sat down to record an interview with Fountain Hughes in Hughes’ modest Baltimore living room.
Neither interviewer nor interviewee was in any way famous. Norwood was not a journalist or historian, but rather an engineer employed by the U.S. Library of Congress. Hughes was a very elderly African-American man of unknown age who had worked for most of his life as a manure hauler in Baltimore. But one thing made the interview extraordinary — Hughes was one of a dwindling number of people able to give a first-hand account of what it…