Who Speaks for the Negro

Background

In preparation for Random House's 1965 publication of his book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Warren traveled throughout the United States in early 1964 and spoke with large numbers of men and women who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He interviewed nationally-known figures as well as people working in the trenches of the movement whose names might otherwise be lost to history. In each case, he recorded their conversations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Often, Warren would begin by asking about the speakers' backgrounds, which often prompted them to talk about the inequalities that they had experienced that led to their participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Warren would also often ask the interviewees to respond to works from other writers, mainly W. E. B. Dubois's The Souls of Black Folk, Kenneth Clark's essays about the detrimental effects of segregation on children, Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma, and James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name. As well, Warren would ask his interviewees their opinion on a number of key historical American figures, 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 as well as Warren’s reflections on the individuals he interviewed and his thoughts on the state of the Civil Rights Movement. In the foreword to the volume, Warren insists on the book being a record of his desire to find out more about the Civil Rights Movement 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. It is a record of my 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 the 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.

Reception

Who Speaks for the Negro? was reviewed widely by newspapers, cultural critics, and the general public. The tenor of the reviews varied greatly. Many news reviews—including those from the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—gave the book very positive reviews. Charles Poore, in the New York Times, wrote that "a boon this book confers is to remind us that a main thrust in civilization can never cease to be toward decency and courtesy and justice for all." On the other hand, Warren received hate-mail from writers accusing him of "Communist 'propaganda' [and] advocacy of 'racial mixing.'" A Newsweek article called Warren "paternalistic." More moderately, Albert Murray called Who Speaks the "very best inside report on the Negro Civil Rights Movement by anyone so far" while still acknowledging Warren's segregationist past.

Though widely and for the most part positively reviewed, Who Speaks was not a commercial success, which disappointed Warren greatly. The book was out of print for decades until Yale University Press republished it in 2014 based largely on the traffic generated by the Who Speaks for the Negro? Digital Archive.

Archive

Much of the original material related to the book is still in existence, held at the University of Kentucky and Yale University Libraries. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky digitized their portion of the archival collection and provides searchable and streaming access to the online interviews using OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer). The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Collection can be accessed via SPOKEdb, the Nunn Center's online repository. In 2007, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University began a digital exhibit presenting this material. The exhibit consists of 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.

In the Book

Warren grouped his interviews partly by geography and partly by theme. Each of the chapters consists of both narrativized and transcripted interviews and Warren's descriptions of setting, as well as deeper reflections inspired by the intervewees.

Chapter 1: The Cleft Stick

Chapter 2: A Mississippi Journal

Chapter 3: The Big Brass

Chapter 4: Leadership from the Periphery

Chapter 5: The Young

In the Archive

Not all of the interviews made it directly into Warren's book. The original audiotapes and materials for Who Speaks for the Negro? also contained interviews with the following people. The audio and transcripts for these, as well as full interviews from the persons in the book mentioned above, are available at the Who Speaks for the Negro? Digital Archive of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University.