These are tales of American slaves, written in their own words and spoken with their own voices.

Written Narratives

Twelve Years a Slave

bySolomon Northup

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

byHarriet Ann Jacobs

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

byFrederick Douglass

Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave

byCharles Ball

Up From Slavery, An Autobiography

byBooker T. Washington

Louisa, The Octoroon, or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life

byLouisa Picquet & Harriet Mattison

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

bySojourner Truth

Slave Life In Georgia: A Narrative Of The Life, Sufferings, And Escape Of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Now In England

byJohn Brown

Audio Narratives

Interview with Alice Gaston, Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1941

byAlice Gaston

Interview with Charlie Smith, Bartow, Florida, March 17, 1975

byCharlie Smith & Elmer Sparks

Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland, June 11, 1949.

byFountain Hughes & Hermond Norwood

Interview with Isom Moseley, Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1941

byIsom Moseley & Robert Sonkin

Interview with Joe McDonald and Unidentified Woman, Livingston, Alabama, 1940

byJoe McDonald, John A. & Ruby T. Lomax, and Unidentified Woman

Interview with Wallace Quarterman, Fort Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia, June 1935

byWallace Quarterman, Unidentified Woman Interviewer, Alan Lomax(?), & Zora Neale Hurston

SlaveryStories is an open source project that anyone can can contribute to. Let's make these stories easier to find and present them in a design that's more pleasurable to read.

Download the stories or contribute new ones so that we can work together to preserve this essential history.

Learn more

Want to contribute to the project? It's easy.

Find a narrative that you'd like to share

There are many sources of public-domain slave narratives that could be made more accessible to the world by being added to this easy-to-read collection. Sources include Voices From the Days of Slavery through the Library of Congress as well as public-domain manuscripts and books.

Get the narrative into HTML

Once you've found a slave narrative to be added to the collection, transcribe the narrative into simple and standard HTML. There is a formatting guide available at the project Wiki.

Share the narrative with the project on GitHub

To contribute a narrative, create a pull request at the project's Github. You can read more about using Github in this guide.

Read the narrative on any of your devices!

Because the narratives are in HTML, we can easily format this reflowable text for display on computers, mobile phones, and tablets. Easier reading across devices helps these slave narratives be read more frequently and with less effort!

About SlaveryStories.org

This site has two purposes:

  1. To make it easier for people to read about the history of American slavery, in the own words of those who went through this terrible ordeal.
  2. To create an open source collaboration that anyone in the world can access and contribute to.

We know that people read on a variety of devices today so we wanted to provide a great experience across desktop computers, tablets, and other mobile devices.

We’d love for you to participate on this project with us. You can find out more about contributing at the project Github account!

This site was created and is maintained by Scholastica, a publishing platform for academic journals.