Who Speaks for the Negro? : The Robert Penn Warren Interviews

In 1964, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the civil rights movement. He traveled the country, from the back roads of rural Mississippi to the streets of America’s northern cities, speaking with luminaries such as James Baldwin, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins. In Harlem, Warren sat down for a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X that unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.

Penn Warren went on to write the 1965 classic Who Speaks For the Negro?, his own account of these conversations that incorporated short excerpts from the interviews. However, the audiotapes of his full conversations disappeared into the archives and have remained largely unknown, until now. Free All Along presents these interviews in their entirety as original documents with pressing relevance for our own times. This major contribution to our understanding of the modern struggle for civil rights, which will be released in conjunction with an American RadioWorks® documentary—brings to life the voices of America’s civil rights generation—writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals—whose words and ideas will resonate with a new generation of young people fighting for racial equality in America.