Who Speaks for the Negro?
*Who Speaks for the Negro? It was published on this date in 1965. This is a book of interviews by Robert Penn Warren conducted with 20th-century American Civil Rights Movement activists.
In preparation for the book, Warren traveled throughout the United States in early 1964 and spoke with many men and women who were involved in civil rights. He interviewed nationally known figures and people working in the trenches of the movement whose names might otherwise have been lost to history. He recorded their conversations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Warren often began by asking about the speakers' backgrounds, prompting them to discuss America's racial segregation. He would ask them to respond to works from other writers, mainly W. E. B. Dubois, Kenneth Clark's essays, Gunnar Myrdal's, and James Baldwin's.
Warren's questions included the opinions of white-Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Robert E. Lee. While Warren was able to interview an impressive number of people, there are very few women in the collection, as well as some notable figures missing from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, Dorothy Cotton, and Fred Shuttlesworth), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, and Julian Bond), and others.
The published volume contains sections of transcripts from the conversations, Warren's reflections on the individuals he interviewed, and his thoughts on the state of the American Civil Rights Movement. In the foreword, Warren insists that the book be a record of his desire to learn more about American Civil Rights rather than an unbiased or comprehensive volume.
Warren states in the foreword: This book is not a history, a sociological analysis, an anthropological study, or a Who's Who of the Negro Revolution. According to Penn, it is a record of an attempt to find out what I could find out. It is primarily a transcript of conversations, with settings and commentaries. That is, I want to make my reader see, hear, and feel as immediately as possible what I saw, heard, and felt as an oral history of America's 20th-century civil rights movement.
Who Speaks may be compared to, among others, The New World of Negro Americans by Harold Isaacs, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered by Howell Raines, and My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience by Juan Williams.
The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University also created a Who Speaks for the Negro? Digital archive featuring digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees, as well as print materials related to the project, including the transcripts of those recordings, letters written between Warren and the interviewees, and contemporary reviews of the book. The book was reissued by Yale University Press in 2014.
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