"Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is--'tis he who has endured."
My first and foremost inspiration for this project was the HBO special also aired on PBS called: Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives. This documentary was researched and taken directly from the National Writers Project of 1936-1938 during the great depression. At the time writers were hired by the federal government through the WPA to conduct thousands of interviews, take audio recordings, and photographs of former slaves throughout the USA.
“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.”
- An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives
by Norman R. Yetman
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snintro00.html