Fountain Hughes

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

Baltimore, Maryland, November 1949. From Library of Congress: American Folklife Center.

https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1950037_afs09990a and https://www.wdl.org/en/item/110/

Fountain Hughes of Baltimore was interviewed in 1949, when he was 101 years old, 84 years after emancipation. Even at the distance of many decades, Hughes provides vivid details of the brutality the slave regime and the daily struggles of enslaved people.

"Approximately 4 million slaves were freed at the conclusion of the American Civil War. The stories of a few thousand have been passed on to future generations through word of mouth, diaries, letters, records, or written transcripts of interviews. Only 26 audio-recorded interviews of ex-slaves have been found, 23 of which are in the collections of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In this interview, 101-year-old Fountain Hughes recalls his boyhood as a slave, the Civil War, and life in the United States as an African American from the 1860s to the 1940s. About slavery, he tells the interviewer: "You wasn't no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn't treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still I didn't like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don't like to say. And I won't say a whole lot more.""