Prologue

Abstract

In the summer of 1937, in his interview with Susie R. C. Byrd, a worker with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Allen Crawford stated, “I was bred and born and reared within three miles of Nat Turner’s insurrection—Travis Place.”1 The interview documents Crawford’s recollections of the stories he’d heard growing up in Southampton County about the Southampton Rebellion. Workers asked all participants in Virginia’s WPA interviews about slave rebellions as a part of their official questions and were met with varying responses from interviewees....