Notes on Language and Vocabulary

Language

Where possible, we have retained the author’s original spelling in the primary document translations. Each document includes a glossary of words students may not be familiar with.

Following the lead of many historians, renowned publications, and style guides, we chose to capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. “For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. ‘White’ carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”[i]

About the WPA narratives

These interviews were done primarily by white writers employed by the Works Progress Administration. The interviewers wrote down the subjects’ words as they heard them, so they appear in a colloquial or vernacular dialect that looks strange to us today. Keep in mind that most of the interview subjects had little or no formal schooling, as they had been enslaved as children prior to 1865. Most of the interview subjects were elderly at the time of their interviews and were recalling episodes that happened 60 or more years earlier.

Vocabulary

Abolitionist: A person who sought an immediate end to chattel slavery in the United States during the 19th century. Throughout the antebellum period those organizing and galvanizing for the abolitionist cause were a small minority of the population. Black and mixed-race Americans (including Indigenous people) were heavily represented within this group. Conversely, only a small percentage of the nation's white population were abolitionists, but their numbers grew in the 1850s. 

Antislavery activists: This term covers members of a large group of people with a range of attitudes about slavery and Black people, and their access to civil rights.  Some antislavery activists advocated for the containment of chattel slavery within its existing early-19th-century state boundaries and strongly opposed its expansion into new territories. Others were committed to gradual emancipation. Beginning in the 1830s, but especially after 1850, a growing percentage of the nation's white population in the North professed to be antislavery. Sometimes the term “antislavery” is used to refer to the movement that consisted of abolitionist and more moderate antislavery activists.  We are spelling the word “antislavery” without a hyphen; however, you will see examples of historical documents that spell the word “anti-slavery.”

Anti-abolitionist: A person who supported the constitutional right to enslave people and spoke out against antislavery activism. 

Chattel Slavery: A system (legal, political, and social) in which an enslaved person is held as the legal property of another. In the United States, the system of chattel slavery allowed white people to legally own people of African descent.

Enslaved: We use the term “enslaved people” to refer to people who were bound into legal servitude. We use this term to affirm the humanity of the people and not define them by the condition in which they were held. In primary documents, we have preserved historic use of the word “slave” to be faithful to the original writer’s words.

Enslaver: We use this term, instead of “owner,” to more accurately describe the actions of white people who held Black people in bondage.

The Liberator: The most well-known abolitionist newspaper in the United States. It was published in Boston and edited by famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Self-emancipated person or freedom-seeker: We have used these words interchangeably, in place of “runaway,” to uphold the agency of people who escape from bondage.