"Set beside the work of formal historians, social scientists, and novelists, slave autobiographies, and contemporary records of abolitionists and planters, these life histories, taken down as far as possible in the narrators' words, constitute an invaluable body of unconscious evidence or indirect source material, which scholars and writers dealing with the South, especially social psychologists and cultural anthropologists, cannot afford to reckon without. For the first and the last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have since died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own way. In spite of obvious limitations—bias and fallibility of both informants and interviewers, the use of leading questions, unskilled techniques, and insufficient controls and checks—this saga must remain the most authentic and colorful source of our knowledge of the lives and thoughts of thousands of slaves, of their attitudes toward one another, toward their masters, mistresses, and overseers, toward poor whites, North and South, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, religion, education, and virtually every phase of Negro life in the South.

"The narratives belong to folk history—history recovered from the memories and lips of participants or eye-witnesses, who mingle group with individual experience and both with observation, hearsay, and tradition. Whether the narrators relate what they actually saw and thought and felt, what they imagine, or what they have thought and felt about slavery since, now we know why they thought and felt as they did. To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves' own folklore and folk-say of slavery. The patterns they reveal are folk and regional patterns—the patterns of field hand, house and body servant, and artisan; the patterns of kind and cruel master or mistress; the patterns of Southeast and Southwest, lowland and upland, tidewater and inland, smaller and larger plantations, and racial mixture (including Creole and Indian).

"The narratives belong also to folk literature. Rich not only in folk songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry, crude or skilful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive detail. In their unconscious art, exhibited in many a fine and powerful short story, they are a contribution to the realistic writing of the Negro. Beneath all the surface contradictions and exaggerations, the fantasy and flattery, they possess an essential truth and humanity which surpasses as it supplements history and literature."

Those interviewed in Parts 1 & 2 of the Arkansas Slave Narratives (and their city or county, if known) were:
Silas Abbott (Brinkley), Lucian Abernathy (Marvell), Laura Abromsom (Holly Grove), Aunt Adeline (Fayetteville), Rose Adway (Pine Bluff), Liddie Aiken (Wheatley), Mattie Aldridge (Hazen), Amsy O. Alexander (Little Rock), Diana Alexander (Brinkley), Fannie Alexander (Helena), Lucretia Alexander (Little Rock), Ed Allen (Des Arc), Lucindy Allison (Marked Tree), Josephine Ames (Fordville), Charles Anderson (Helena), Nancy Anderson (West Memphis), R.B. Anderson (Little Rock), Sarah Anderson (Pine Bluff), Selie Anderson (Holly Grove), W.A. Anderson (Little Rock), Henry Anthony (Biscoe), Katie Arbery (Pine Bluff), Campbell Armstrong (Little Rock), Cora Armstrong,
Lillie Baccus (Madison), Joseph Samuel Badgett (Little Rock), Jeff Bailey (Little Rock), James Baker (Hot Springs), William Baltimore (Pine Bluff), Mose Banks (El Dorado), Henry Banner (Little Rock), John W.H. Barnett (Marianna), Josephine Ann Barnett (De Valls Bluff), Lizzie Barnett (Conway), Spencer Barnett (Holly Grove), Emma Barr (Madison), Robert Barr (Little Rock), Matilda Bass (Pine Bluff), Emmett Beal (Biscoe), Dina Beard, Annie Beck (West Memphis), J.H. Beckwith (Pine Bluff), Enoch Beel (Hazen), Sophie D. Belle (Forrest City), Cyrus Bellus (Little Rock), Bob Benford (Pine Bluff), Carrie Bradley Logan Bennet (Helena), George Benson (Pine Bluff), Kato Benton (Pine Bluff), James Bertrand Little Rock), Alice Biggs (Holly Grove), Mandy Billings (Pine Bluff), Jane Birch (Brinkley), Beatrice Black (Biscoe), Boston Blackwell (North Little Rock), Henry Blake (Little Rock), Adeline Blakeley (Fayetteville), Vera Roy Bobo (Holly Grove), Liddie Boechus (Madison), Maggie (Bunny) Bond (Madison), Caroline Bonds (Russellville), Rev. Frank T. Boone (Little Rock), J.F. Boone (Little Rock), Jonas Boone (St. Charles), John Bowdry (Clarendon), Jack Boyd (Hazen), Mal Boyd (Pine Bluff), George Braddox (Hazen), Edward Bradley (Pine Bluff), Rachel Bradley (Pine Bluff), Elizabeth Brannon (Biscoe), Mack Brantley (Brinkley), Ellen Brass (Little Rock), Alice Bratton (Wheatley), Frank Briles (Little Rock), Mary Ann Brooks (Pine Bluff), Waters Brooks (Little Rock), Casie Jones Brown, Elcie Brown, F.H. Brown (North Little Rock), George Brown (Pine Bluff), J.N. Brown (Pine Bluff), Lewis Brown (Pine Bluff), Lewis Brown (Little Rock), Mag Brown (Clarksville), Mary Brown (Clarendon), Mattie Brown (Helena), Molly Brown (Brinkley), Peter Brown (Helena), William Brown (Hazen), William Brown (North Little Rock), Maggie Broyles (Forrest City), Ida Bryant (Hazen), Belle Buntin (Marianna), Jeff Burgess (Clarendon), Norman Burkes (Pine Bluff), Will Burks, Sr. (Pine City), Adeline Burris (DeWitt), Jennie Butler (Little Rock), E.L. Byrd (Pine Bluff), Emmett Augusta Byrd (Marianna)
Frank Cannon (Palestine), Zenie Cauley (Pine Bluff), Liney Chambers (Brinkley), Willie Buck Charleston, Jr. (Biscoe), Lewis Chase (Des Arc), Katherine Clay (Forrest City), Maria Sutton Clements (De Valls Bluff), Fannie Clemons (El Dorado), Joe Clinton (Marvell), Betty Coleman (Pine Bluff), Lucy Cotton (Russellville), T.W. Cotton (helena), Ellen Cragin (Little Rock), Sallie Crane (Wrightsville), Isaac Crawford (Brinkley), Mary Crosby (Pine Bluff), Ellen Crowley, Richard Crump (Little Rock), Zenia Culp, Albert Cummins (Texarkana), Betty Curlett (Hazen), J.H. Curlett (Washington),
Lyttleton Dandridge (Pine Bluff), Ella Daniels (Little Rock), Mary Allen Darrow (Forrest City), Alice Davis (Pine Bluff), Charlie Davis (Pine Bluff), D. Davis (Marvell), James Davis (Pine Bluff), Jeff Davis (Pine Bluff), Jeff Davis (Marvell), Jordan Davis (Pine Bluff), Mary Jane Drucilla Davis (Pine Bluff), Minerva Davis (Biscoe), Rosetta Davis (Marianna), Virginia (Jennie) Davis (Forrest City), Winnie Davis (Pine Bluff), Leroy Day (Pine Bluff), Hammett Dell (Brasfield), James Dickey (Marianna), Benjamin Diggs (Pine Bluff), Katie Dillon (Pine Bluff), Alice Dixon (Rock Island quarters), Luke D. Dixon (De Valls Bluff), Martha Ann Dixon (De Valls Bluff), Railroad Dockery (Pine Bluff), Callie Donalson (Biscoe), Charles Green Dortch (Little Rock), Fannie Dorum (North Little Rock), Silas Dothrum (Little Rock), Sarah and Tom Douglas (El Dorado), Sebert Douglas (Pine Bluff), Henry Doyl (Brinkley), Willie Doyld (Brinkley), Wade Dudley (Moro), Isabella Duke (Little Rock), Wash Dukes (Pine Bluff), Lizzie Dunn (Clarendon), Nellie Dunne (Pine Bluff), William L. Dunwoody (Little Rock),
Lucius Edwards, John Elliott (South Border), Millie Evans, Mose Evans,
Rachel Fairley (Little Rock), Pauline Fakes (Brinkley), Mattie Fannen (Forrest City), Robert Farmer (Little Rock), Lou Fergusson (Hot Springs), Jennie Ferrell (West Memphis), Frank Fikes (El Dorado), J.E. Filer (Marianna), Orleans Finger (Little Rock), Molly Finley (Honey Creek), Fanny Finney (Brinkley), Gate-Eye Fisher (Washington County), Ellen Fitzgerald (Brinkley), Henry Fitzhugh (Hot Springs), Mary Flagg (Pine Bluff), Doc Flowers (Lincoln), Frances Fluker (Edmondson), Ida May Fluker (Pine Bluff), Wash Ford (Des Arc), Judia Fortenberry (Little Rock), Emma Foster (Pine Bluff), Ira Foster (Pine Bluff), Leonard Franklin (Little Rock), Eliza Fazier (Pine Bluff), Mary Frazier (Biscoe), Tyler Frazier (Ouachita County), Mittie Freeman (North Little Rock), Mattie Fritz (Clarendon)