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From 1936-38, the Works Progress Administration interviewed thousands offormer slaves about their life experiences. While these interviews are crucialto understanding the "peculiar institution" from the standpoint of the slavehimself, issues relating to bias cloud analyses of these interviews. Theproblem I investigate is the problem of candour in the WPA slave narratives: itis widely held in the historical community that the strict racial caste systemof the Deep South compelled black ex-slaves to tell white interviewers whatthey thought they wanted to hear, suggesting that there was a significantdifference candour depending on whether their interviewer was white or black.In this work, I attempt to quantitatively characterise this race-relatedproblem of candour. Prior work has either been of an impressionistic,qualitative nature, or utilised exceedingly simple quantitative methodology. Incontrast, I use more sophisticated statistical methods: in particular wordfrequency and sentiment analysis and comparative topic modelling with LDA totry and identify differences in the content and sentiment expressed byex-slaves in front of white interviewers versus black interviewers. While mysentiment analysis methodology was ultimately unsuccessful due to thecomplexity of the task, my word frequency analysis and comparative topicmodelling methods both showed strong evidence that the content expressed infront of white interviewers was different from that of black interviewers. Inparticular, I found that the ex-slaves spoke much more about unfavourableaspects of slavery like whipping and slave patrollers in front of interviewersof their own race. I hope that my more-sophisticated statistical methodologyhelps improve the robustness of the argument for the existence of this problemof candour in the slave narratives, which some would seek to deny forrevisionist purposes.

"I ain't tellin' white folks nuthin": A quantitative exploration of the race-related problem of candour in the WPA slave narratives