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 spoke with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.
A year later, Penn Warren would publishWho Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. The large collection of audiotapes of his conversations, however, remained unknown to the public until rediscovered by scholars in recent years. A major contribution in their own right to our understanding of the struggle for civil rights, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents with pressing relevance today.
Published to coincide with a national radio documentary from American RadioWorks®,Free All Alongbrings to life the voices of America’s civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.
