"I never talk to nobody 'bout this" was the response of one aged African American when asked by a Works Project Administration field worker to share memories of his life in slavery and after emancipation. He and other ex-slaves were uncomfortable with the memories of a time when black and white lives were interwoven through human bondage. Yet the WPA field workers overcame the old people's reticence, and American West scholars T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker have collected all the known WPA Oklahoma "slave narratives" in this volume for the first time - including fourteen never published before. Their careful editorial notes detail what is known about the interviewers and the process of preparing the narratives.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

First-person narratives from Native Americans who were enslaved right alongside African Americans, and African Americans owned by Native Americans.

The life of a cowboy was hardly glamorous. Poorly fed, underpaid, overworked, deprived of sleep, and prone to boredom and loneliness, cowboys choked in the dust, were cold at night, and suffered broken bones in falls and spills from horses. African American cowboys, however, also had to survive discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice. From scattered courthouse records, writings, and interviews with a few of the African American cowhands who were part of the history of Texas, Sara R. Massey and a host of writers have retrieved the little known stories of some of these cowboys. Among the stories in Black Cowboys of Texas, are those of Peter Martin, a freight hauler who assisted in a rebellion against the Mexican government: Bose Ikard, who went on the cattle drive that opened the Goodnight-Loving Trail; and Johanna July, a Black Seminole woman who trained horses for U.S. soldiers.