Roscoe Lewis and an Early Edition of Black History
Hundreds of the vivid accounts about the experience of enslavement in America come to us thanks to a small team of Black researchers who worked behind the lines of Jim Crow segregation in the 1930s, led in Virginia by a chemistry professor named Roscoe E. Lewis.
The work of Lewis and his Howard University colleague Sterling Brown yielded a landmark book of social history published by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1940, and helped lay the foundation for The 1619 Project. I had the privilege of featuring these earlier historians’ work in Virginia recently in an article for the Washington Post magazine. As often the case, some gems got left on the cutting room floor due to space constraints. Here I’d like to share some of those glittering bits that add to the story.
Born in DC’s Anacostia neighborhood, Roscoe Lewis became a chemistry professor at Hampton University in southern Virginia and taught there for nearly a decade before he was recruited by his Howard University colleague Sterling Brown to lead an all-Black unit of the Federal Writers’ Project in Virginia, focused on Black history. They approached the work with the idea that in revealing the suppressed history of African Americans’ role in making America, there was a path toward making the U.S. a real democracy.
Lewis and Brown and their staff across Virginia, including Susie R.C. Byrd and other interviewers, faced strong resistance from the white public, skeptics in Congress, and J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. Hoover himself saw Black intellectuals — historians, poets, scientists —as dangerous radicals. The list of Black Federal Writers’ Project staff on whom Hoover’s FBI files kept files is staggering. (Many of those F.B.I. files are online here thanks to William J. Maxwell.) Sterling Brown, for one, complained of FBI agents’ harassment for years afterward.
The Negro in Virginia, their first in a series planned on Black history nationwide, was published in 1940. (Read the Post article for how that unfolded and its reception.) Even after his WPA job wound to a close, though, the history of slavery kept its grip on Lewis, and he published more interviews over the next twenty years, even after the struggle for racial equality shifted to the grassroots activism of the civil rights movement.
During World War II, Lewis’ work became outspoken about racial violence. His 1943 essay, “The Role of Pressure Groups,” notes America’s hypocrisy of having Black Americans fighting for freedom abroad while refusing to pass any “anti-lynching law with teeth in it.” Across the South, attacks on Black soldiers “point to a rapidly-approaching collapse of law and order in America,” he wrote. So demanding equity and reform was essential, at least to sustain a sense “that the American way of life is being pushed steadily, even if slowly, along a path that some day may lead to democracy.”
The Post article quotes novelist P. Djelí Clark on his 2018 dark fantasy fiction, “Night Doctors,” which references a real WPA interviewee in Virginia and his story of “Ku Kluxers” posing as doctors. Clark, in researching a Masters thesis in history, immersed himself in the WPA interviews at the Library of Congress. But he acknowledges risks of relying on the WPA interviews for historical accuracy. He and other historians note that most WPA interviewers were white, and the texts with African American interviewees reflect their bias. As Clark noted, “things can switch depending on who the interviewer is and how comfortable they feel in relaying traumatic stories.” Yet if approached individually and used carefully, the interviews hold riches that can be valuable given the correct context. “More historians, especially historians of slavery, have really been sourcing them, after dismissing the archive for quite a while, or at least holding it at bay,” Clark told me.
Another historian who has revisited the work of Lewis and the Virginia Negro Studies Project is Carole Emberton, whose new book To Walk About in Freedom draws on those interviews in Virginia and beyond to create a portrait of Priscilla Joyner, who was interviewed by Lewis and a young WPA writer and teacher Thelma Dunston, although Lewis didn’t credit her in the interview write-up. I reviewed Emberton’s book for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Audrey Davis, who directs the Alexandria Black History Museum and whose grandfather was friends with Roscoe Lewis and Sterling Brown, sees in the National Museum of African American History and Culture a legacy that that generation “just never imagined.”
“My grandfather would have spent hours in that museum. And so would Sterling Brown and Roscoe E. Lewis.” The Alexandria Black History Museum is part of that legacy; its oral history program and interpretation of historic sites continue their work. “Their legacy lives on in what many of us in the field are doing today.”
You can listen to the full episode of The People’s Recorder about Lewis’s work in Virginia, supported with grant funding from Virginia Humanities. The podcast’s full season will be released in the coming months.
