R148, the person you’re lecturing didn’t invent those former slave interviews, they are what they are. Mentioning that they exist doesn’t automatically make someone a white supremacist as you claim.
I read about those interviews a long time ago. I have a particular interest in WPA program work because my grandfather worked for the WPA. That concept was invented for the Great Depression by FDR and the purpose was to provide work for as many types of trades and professions as possible. In my town, the local post office and my school both had wonderful 1930s art murals painted as WPA jobs for artists so they could support their families.
When I originally read about the WPA interviewers going to interview elderly former slaves, the interviewers were described as scholars who could not find work during the Depression. The ones I read about were young people who should have been establishing themselves as scholars, but there was no work. They were sent to very small towns and villages in the Deep South, but the ones I read about were young college graduate Northerners who would travel to interview the elderly people. The people were too old to travel themselves, so people had to go to them. I believe at least some of the interviews were recorded and then transcribed. The people interviewed were very elderly and it was thought that recording their thoughts before they died was worth doing as a historical document.
If you’re going to say that all these old people were liars or crazy, that’s just dismissing their personal experiences. They were the few people left on earth at that time with any first hand knowledge of that era. Assuming every one that said something you don’t like was a liar, is dismissing the only historical record we have. The whole point of recording their thoughts was so there would be a historical first account record, even though it was many years later. Many of those people were illiterate, and couldn’t write their own memoirs. Being interviewed was the only way to preserve their thoughts.
The same thing has been done with Holocaust survivors, and many of those people were also very old and described scenes from many decades before. No one discounts their accounts as being lies or by crazy people because of their age. That’s the age they were when they were interviewed. People don’t necessarily lose their minds because they’re old. If you choose to disbelieve anything you disagree with, that’s your choice.
But the interviews were recorded at the behest of a Democratic, Northern President, who had no reason to defend slavery. They were done by people from out of town, not the local Ku Klux Klan member. And while the old people were living through the Great Depression, often in poverty, many had always lived a similar lifestyle out in the country, on remote, small farms. Nothing had changed too much for them because of the Depression. They were old and retired by that time, so they weren’t working anyway.
In those days, the majority of Americans lived in rural areas and on farms. Large cities were a much smaller percentage of the population. Those old people’s small farms and modest country homes were typical for that era. My own family had a modest farm in that era: no electricity, outhouse and Sunday bath in the kitchen from water heated on the stove. That wasn’t considered particularly unusual in those days, it was pretty normal. So the idea of poverty back then is not what you think now. People weren’t as materialistic then. People weren’t conscious of lack of fancy possessions equaling “suffering.” Lots of people with no money thought they were doing fine. Including my family, who grew all their own food during the Depression and had no cash money. My mother wore dresses made of flour sacks and wore cut down adult clothing, which many children did then. That wasn’t “poor” then. Hungry was “poor.”