First, this study argues that the Oregon Writers' Project cannot be used as a measurement for the effectiveness of government subsidy of the arts. The people who ran the program never claimed to be supporting art but to be supporting unemployed writers. In fact, the administrators tried to discourage any freedom or flexibility which would have provided a climate for the writer to flourish in the artistic sense. With this recognition in mind, one may not validly use the Writers' Project as a tool for accurate measurement of governmental subsidization of art. This study also takes major exception to a previous work presented on the Federal Writers' Project in the Pacific Northwest. That study argued that a project was unnecessary in the Pacific Northwest due to the area's "literary and intellectual backwardness." In Oregon the program certainly had its problems, but the project was generally successful in meeting the major intent of the program--employing the unemployed in their self-selected profession. This program was not only useful but also humane; furthermore, it managed to preserve important history and the skills of people out of work in a time of severe depression.

In 1936, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) employees began interviewing formerly enslaved men and women, allowing them to speak publicly of their experiences under slavery. Defying racism and the repressions of Jim Crow, ex-slaves discussed intimate details of their lives. Many researchers considered these interviews unreliable, but if viewed through the lens of gender and analyzed using recent scholarship on slavery and sexuality, FWP interviews offer new insights into the lives of enslaved men and women. Using a small number of ex-slave interviews, most of them drawn from Louisiana, this thesis demonstrates the value of these oral histories for understanding the sexual lives of enslaved men and women. These interviews expose what we would otherwise have little access to: the centrality of struggles over enslaved people’s sexuality and reproduction to the experience of enslavement and the long-term effects of these struggles on the attitudes of slavery’s survivors.

Poet and professor Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) played a significant role in the birth of black literary and cultural studies through his literary and academic careers. Brown helped to establish a new wave of black cultural and folklore studies during his time as the “Director of Negro Affairs” for the Federal Writers’ Project. As a professor at Howard University, Brown influenced black literary studies through his literary criticisms and seminars and his role as a mentor to literary figures of the next generations. Through letters to and from Sterling Brown and manuscripts, this thesis argues that Brown’s poetry, publications and folk studies in the nineteen twenties and thirties where the groundwork for his most prolific role of teacher-mentor.

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Federal Writers' Project were two government survey programs from the 1930s that, in part, documented slavery in America. Historically stakeholders utilized these resources in isolation of one another. Coordination between the two programs in this study has identified five documented slave houses from the HABS collection that are directly linked to a slave narrative recorded by the Writers' Project. The slave narrative brings to life the spatial density, degree of accommodations, nature of the facilities, and attitudes of those who inhabited the slave house. The relationship between the historical record and the stories of the inhabitants is crucial to our understanding and interpretation of the lifeways and settings of enslaved African Americans in the Antebellum South. Historic preservationists now have five personal accounts of the historic plantation landscape upon which to build future interdisciplinary appreciation and research.

In 1942, in New Orleans a group of intellectual and artistic African-Americans, led by Marcus B. Christian, formed an art club named Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters. Les Cenelles members both looked to New Orleans’s Afro-Creole population as the pinnacle of African American artistic achievements and used their example as a model for artists who sought to effect social change. Many of the members of Les Cenelles wrote for the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Program (FWP). A key strategy the members of Les Cenelles used to accomplish their goals was gaining the support of white civic leaders, in particular Lyle Saxon. Christian and Saxon’s relationship was unusual in the 1940s Jim Crow era in the sense that it was built upon mutual respect and admiration. This thesis examines both the efforts of Les Cenelles and the black division of the FWP, as well as Christian and Saxon’s relationship.