Administrators involved in the WPA Slave Narrative Project of the 1930s, which gathered the recollections of formerly enslaved people, engaged in a concerted effort to render the speech of the interviewees into stereotypical Black dialect. As a result, the accents and speech of all the interviewees—from Virginia to Georgia to Texas—appear as if people in those very different regions spoke exactly the same way. The exaggerated dialect was supposed to signal “authenticity,” an authenticity defined by incapacity.
