In the 1981 article "The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality", Brooke Baldwin cites "an almost exhaustive compilation of those accounts which have been found so far" with representations in the white press as early as 1863. This compilation consists of eyewitness accounts by emancipated slaves from Virginia and Georgia recorded by WPA researchers in the 1930s, along with secondhand accounts from other sources. Baldwin notes that "when the researchers of the Federal Writer's Project of the WPA interviewed aged ex-slaves in the 1930s, there was no longer any need to suppress information about the happier moments of slave life" such as when slaves had been able to covertly mock their owners without getting punished, through the signals and expression of dance.