The Florida Negro

About this book

This valuable study of black life in Florida is the original field research of the team assembled by the Works Progress Administration under the guidance of Martin Richardson. Published here with minimal annotations and emendations is the manuscript from the Federal Writers' Project, primarily the 1937 version, including "related documents" and the incomplete revisions the team made in 1938. The work of the FWP team, compiled from archival resources and statistical records, as well as from interviews with a wide range of Florida blacks, provides a vivid documentary description of Florida's African heritage. Reflecting a mixture of both pride and complaint in the black community, their research illuminates the world of such stellar black Floridians as Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Augusta Savage. None of this material has been published previously in the series of WPA guidebooks. Versions of the manuscript and the primary documents are in the archives of the Florida Historical Society, the P. K. Yonge Library at the University of Florida, and the Library of Congress. In his introduction the editor discusses the scope, the purposes, and the achievements of the project, as well as the questions of history, themes, silences, and authorship that the manuscript raises. In the afterword Gertrude Fraser provides an evocative reading of the double vision she finds in the manuscript as both legacy and tool for future investigations of the Florida Negro.