slave narratives

Slave narratives are first-person accounts by formerly enslaved people describing their experiences in bondage and, often, their escape to freedom.

The genre flourished in antebellum America, with narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs among the most influential.

These accounts served abolitionist purposes while documenting the brutalities of slavery.

The term also applies to 20th-century oral histories collected from elderly survivors: The Federal Writers' Project recorded thousands of slave narratives in the 1930s.