  From 1936-38, the Works Progress Administration interviewed thousands of
former slaves about their life experiences. While these interviews are crucial
to understanding the "peculiar institution" from the standpoint of the slave
himself, issues relating to bias cloud analyses of these interviews. The
problem I investigate is the problem of candour in the WPA slave narratives: it
is widely held in the historical community that the strict racial caste system
of the Deep South compelled black ex-slaves to tell white interviewers what
they thought they wanted to hear, suggesting that there was a significant
difference candour depending on whether their interviewer was white or black.
In this work, I attempt to quantitatively characterise this race-related
problem of candour. Prior work has either been of an impressionistic,
qualitative nature, or utilised exceedingly simple quantitative methodology. In
contrast, I use more sophisticated statistical methods: in particular word
frequency and sentiment analysis and comparative topic modelling with LDA to
try and identify differences in the content and sentiment expressed by
ex-slaves in front of white interviewers versus black interviewers. While my
sentiment analysis methodology was ultimately unsuccessful due to the
complexity of the task, my word frequency analysis and comparative topic
modelling methods both showed strong evidence that the content expressed in
front of white interviewers was different from that of black interviewers. In
particular, I found that the ex-slaves spoke much more about unfavourable
aspects of slavery like whipping and slave patrollers in front of interviewers
of their own race. I hope that my more-sophisticated statistical methodology
helps improve the robustness of the argument for the existence of this problem
of candour in the slave narratives, which some would seek to deny for
revisionist purposes.
