Benjamin A. Botkin

Benjamin Botkin, as folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project from 1938, organised the thousands of interviews with formerly enslaved people collected in the 1930s and selected them for Lay My Burden Down in 1945. Most interviewers were white and many transcribed speech in exaggerated dialect, which historians now weigh when reading the accounts. The full Slave Narrative Collection is held by the Library of Congress.