Old Massa's People

O. K. Armstrong, founder of the University of Florida School of Journalism and former U. S. Congressman from Missouri was an early proponent of civil rights for African-Americans and Native Americans. Armstrong spent many years during the Great Depression researching this portrayal of the culture of old Dixie by interviewing, in every state of the old Confederacy, more than twelve hundred former slaves in their ninth to eleventh decades of life. He was skilled as an interviewer, making his subjects feel at ease. He was at home with any group without regard to its members' profession or to their current or ancestral culture. The original purpose of the book was to depict the Old South as the Negro saw it. The book compiles the stories of those brought into the sphere of cruel traders and owners as depicted in the critically acclaimed ROOTS by Alex Haley as well as the stories of those more fortunate, of whom Mammy in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is a reminder. Many of these slaves were brought into the inner sanctum of the owner's family, but many others were not. Slavery was, and still is an evil practice the exists in some parts of the world.

Armstrong recorded the interviews in this book in their vernacular and did so with a respect, fondness or even a kinship with those he interviewed. Today, political forces have distorted the truth about the plight of black slaves in the South. The agrarian economy of the South was pre-industrial and slavery was the unfortunate result. Of course there was racial abuse in the South and in the North, that is uncontested, but that was not the norm according to the black slaves themselves. Their story is presented in their own words in OLD MASSA'S PEOPLE. This book was originally published in 1931 by Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis. The subjects of Armstrong's interviews often used the "n word," so it appears in this book just as in the original publication in 1931.