“In the Name of God and Truth”: The Slave Narrative at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract Scholars of the nineteenth century have long been fascinated by the published slave narrative, and the written testimony of the formerly enslaved has done much to inform studies of slavery, abolition, and fugitivity. However, this article posits that comparatively little attention has been paid to “late-stage” slave narratives—defined here as those narratives published between 1885 and 1915—and it argues that these autobiographies remained important to postbellum civil rights activism and Black community building, as they preserved an accurate memory of enslavement for those generations born after emancipation. It places the slave narrative within larger networks of postbellum community activism and argues for an intergenerational conception of the turn-of-the-century slave narrative. Furthermore, it contends that postbellum Black activists and writers portrayed slavery as antecedent to turn-of-the-century racial politics, while seeking to place the slave narrative squarely within that context. Finally, it compares the slave narrative to the polemics of postbellum authors like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, arguing that formerly enslaved writers offered depictions of slavery that both complemented and diverged from those of the young generation of activists.