User:Cjr100B/Willie and Mary Roberts

Willie and Mary Roberts were an African-American couple residing in Durham County, North Carolina, during the mid-1930s; together, they owned a farm and managed a farm-tool repair shop. The couple were interviewees of the Federal Writers’ Project, North Carolina section. The history account of their interview is held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Marriage and family
Mary Roberts came from a relatively educated African-American family. Her mother was a high-school graduate and a teacher. Her father, also educated, had bought a farm of 46 acres which was later passed down to Mary. After her first husband had died, Mary married his acquaintance Willie Roberts. Although they had no children, the Roberts couple adopted three boys and one girl.

Career
The Roberts had varied sources of income, and thus did not live a life of poverty. The couple raised corns on their farm, and owned livestock such as cow, ox, hogs and chicken. Besides doing farm works, Mary had worked as a maid and Willie operated a mechanic shop that specialized in farm tool repairing. The coupled owned a Model-T and lived in a four-bedroomed old house owned by Mary’s parents next to their farm. Economically, the African-American couple was affluent enough to be considered middle-class.

Racial discrimination
Mary’s parents were discriminated against by the white people because they owned land. This racial and economic discrimination had passed down to the Roberts couple. With the intention of acquiring the couple’s land for nothing, their white neighbors had falsely accused them for overly interacting with white people and managing a brothel in their house. In addition, Willie Roberts was falsely charged against for attacking a white woman, and was consequently sent to work on the road for 8 months. However, the couple demonstrated perseverance in fighting the racial prejudice. They decided to continue their hardworking and optimistic lifestyle despite the discrimination.

Racial prejudice
Racial inequality after the Reconstruction Era was still an infamous phenomenon. African-American citizens lived different lives compared with their white neighbors under the de jure segregation created by the Jim Crow laws. Apart from racial discrimination, African-Americans also suffered from the unjust adjudication of the judicial system. In North Carolina, “There [was] a growing feeling on the part of Negroes in North Carolina that the white people, as represented in the lawmakers, are not treating them right and that there is little hope of fairness to be expected from them so far as appropriations and other things are concerned”. The couple suffered from the false charge of Willie Roberts and were forced to take out a loan to sustain their economic conditions.

Land and economic situation
When the couple was in debt of 100 dollars, they were confident about paying off the debt in a relative short time. As Woodman had pointed out, “[Blacks]achieve[d] a high degree of self-sufficiency and avoid debt-although their motives and goals were quite different from those of the whites”. Because the couple had other sources of income other than farming, they were more cash liquid than single income-source farmers. W.E.B Du Bois’s had suggested that “… black landowners  held  tiny  plots, some so  small  they  could  not possibly support  a family. Many [blacks] had to have nonfarm work or, more likely, work as wage laborers and croppers on plantations to earn enough to support themselves and their families”.

Federal Writers Project
William O. Foster interviewed the Roberts couple in the 1930s for the Federal Writers Project (FWP). The FWP was one of Federal One’s projects under the Works Project Administration, a New Deal program. The FWP served to collect oral histories from common people around the United States and to support writers during the Great Depression. The collections of the FWP was praised by Norman R. Yetman as “an essential source of historical data”. However, the collection process and the production of the FWP’s history accounts were not free from controversy. Historian John W. Blassingame “contended that the social context of the interview and the interviewing techniques were not conducive to candor”. The most prominent aspect of social context in the Roberts’ account was racism. Racial tensions between the Whites and the Blacks during the 1930s could be described by the “…discrimination on the streets and railroads…and by the shot gun and lynching”. Briggs argued that because most of the interviewees were former African-American slaves, they “might [had] felt constricted to tell the truth [of their experiences] to a white person”. The effect of this racial tension was also applicable to the Roberts’ history account. Mary Roberts had shunned away while William Roberts confessed his racist encounter, because she was reluctant to confess their experiences of racism to a white male. Social context shall not be overlooked when reviewing this narrative history.

The narrative histories were not produced verbatim of the interviewees’ words. Instead, the production had undergone manipulation and editing. In order to deliver the couple’s vernacular southern tongue, the dialogue of the Roberts was portrayed through intentional misspelling and misuse of grammar; in contrast, the narration was typed in standard English. According to Blassingame, the editing of the history account created discrepancies between the recorded and the typed versions of the interview. In Roberts’ history account, conversations were edited in which the Roberts’ dialogues were almost direct answers to the interviewer’s questions, which were filtered out in the account. It can be suggested that information irrelevant to the depiction of racial tension and the Great Depression had been edited out. In Yetman’s words, the interview produced stylized responses and lacked spontaneity. Therefore, the element of manipulation and subjectivity shall be taken into account when appraising the historical value of the narrative collection.