Slavery As We’ve Heard It

In the Fall of 1932, the students at Jonesboro Elementary School, Greensboro, N.C., under the direction of Mr. Abraham H. Peeler, undertook an oral history project to document the memories of their parents, grandparents, or relatives. They captured these memories in brief compositions, which were placed in a folder entitled “Slavery As We’ve Heard It.”

Jonesboro School was an appropriate place to center this assignment, since it had been founded after the Civil War as one of the Julius Rosenwald “X-Y-Z” schools: if a neighborhood gave X-money, a city/county Y-money, Rosenwald would donate Z-money, to make it happen.

Jonesboro School, which had been a county school until the big City annexation of 1923, was closed after the 1983 school year.

Below is a list of the students whose essays appear in the volume. Click on the page numbers to view their essays.