Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews

245 Pages·2019·2.66 MB·English

by  Stephen Drury Smith

Free All Along
Also Edited by Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith After the Fall: New Yorkers
Remember September
2001 and the Years That Followed
(with Mary Marshall Clark and Peter Bearman)
Say it Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and
African American Identity Say it Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
Free All Along
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews
Edited by
Stephen Drury Smith and
Catherine Ellis
© 2019 by Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,
without written permission from the publisher.
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The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2019
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution ISBN 978-1-59558-818-0 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-59558-982-8 (ebook) CIP data is available
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Contents Introduction
A Note about Transcripts
Joe Carter
Clarie Collins Harvey
Aaron Henry
Robert P. Moses
Charles Evers
Ralph Ellison
Ezell A. Blair Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Lucy Thornton, and Jean Wheeler
Kenneth B. Clark
James M. Lawson Jr.
Andrew Young
Septima P. Clark
Martin Luther King Jr.
Wyatt Tee Walker
Roy Wilkins
Whitney M. Young Jr.
James Baldwin
Ruth Turner Perot
Malcolm X
Bayard Rustin
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
In 1964, the celebrated Southern writer Robert Penn Warren set out on a fact-
finding mission with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. His aim was to interview leaders of
what some were calling “the Negro Revolution.” Warren wanted to find out what
their goals were and how they planned to achieve them. He was on assignment for
Look, a popular national magazine. But the project would also result in an unusual,
450-page meditation on American race relations called Who Speaks for the Negro?
The book was published in 1965. Some critics praised it as a valuable window
into the African American experience and the freedom movement. Others thought
it poorly organized and unrevealing. Who Speaks for the Negro? was out of print for
decades until Yale University Press reissued the book on its fiftieth anniversary.
Warren was greatly disappointed by the relatively poor sales. Albert Erskine at
Random House explained the problem in a letter: “The real trouble, of course, is
the absolute glut of reading material on the subject and the feeling of many people
that they have read all they intend to about it.”
Warren interviewed nearly four dozen civil rights activists, leaders, and writers
for Who Speaks? He retained the original recordings and their typed transcriptions,
which are now held by the libraries of Yale University and the University of
Kentucky. Vanderbilt University has digitized the interviews and created a
comprehensive website with transcripts and archival material. A selection of these
revealing, wide-ranging conversations is edited and presented here.
In Who Speaks? Warren wove together interview excerpts with his own
impressions of the speakers and larger observations about the movement. In this
edited anthology the focus is on the interviews themselves, framed by some
biographical and historical context. They are arranged chronologically. This
anthology also features two interviews—with Andrew Young and Septima Clark—
left out of Warren’s book.
Free All Along draws its title from Warren’s interview with the writer Ralph
Ellison. It offers the opportunity to hear directly from a range of history-making
African Americans at a critical time in the civil rights movement. A major
contribution in their own right to our understanding of the black freedom struggle,
these remarkable long-form interviews also have pressing relevance today.
When Warren hit the road in the early months of 1964, the civil rights
movement was convulsing American society, especially in the Jim Crow South.
Over the previous decade, activists had launched boycotts, protest marches, lunch
counter sit-ins, voter registration drives, rallies, and mass meetings, all to demand
equal rights and equal protection under the law for black Americans. In many
communities, whites responded with rage and lethal violence. In 1961, African
American and white Freedom Riders challenged segregation on interstate buses. In
Alabama and Mississippi, they were attacked and jailed, and one of their buses was
torched. In 1962, white rioters tried to block an African American student named
James Meredith from entering the University of Mississippi. In 1963, four black
girls were murdered in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
organizer Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, and
activist Fannie Lou Hamer was badly beaten by police in a Winona, Mississippi jail.
Also in 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and President John F. Kennedy sent
Congress his proposed civil rights legislation. These critical events were the
backdrop to Warren’s journey of investigation.
Look published Warren’s lengthy article “The Negro Now” in March 1965.
Who Speaks for the Negro? was published by Random House two months later. At
the time, Warren had long been regarded as one of the nation’s foremost authors
and poets. His best-known novel, All the King’s Men, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize.
It was made into a movie that won the 1949 Academy Award for best picture.
Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1958 and again in 1979. He is the only
person to have won the prize for both fiction and poetry.
Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905, the son of a
businessman and a schoolteacher. He grew up on a tobacco farm, where his
grandfathers—both of whom had fought for the Confederacy—told stories of the
Civil War. Warren attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where
he met other Southern writers who would go on to form a literary group called the
Agrarians. In 1930, they produced a collection of essays, I’ll Take My Stand,
proclaiming the virtues of agrarian life over modern industrialization. Warren’s
contribution was an essay called “Briar Patch,” which historian David W. Blight
describes as an “ambivalent” and “poorly argued” defense of segregation in which
Warren contended that rural life best suited the “temperament and capacity” of
Southern blacks. Warren’s attitudes about race, however, became increasingly
progressive over the decades; literary scholar David A. Davis says Warren came to
condemn segregation as dangerous and damaging to both blacks and whites. But as
commentators worked to understand Warren’s conceptions of race—in both his
fiction and his journalism—many inevitably cited “Briar Patch.” In Blight’s words,
the essay “haunted Warren for the rest of his life.”
Warren left the South to study at the University of California–Berkeley, Yale,
and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He taught at several colleges and
universities, finally landing back at Yale, where he was on the faculty from 1951 to
1973. He died in 1989 in Stratton, Vermont.
Much of Warren’s fiction, poetry, and journalism concentrated on race and the
relationship between whites and African Americans, particularly in the South.
Following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision,
which struck down school segregation laws, Warren set out on a reporting trip
through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. He asked
blacks and whites he met along the way what they thought the South would look
like in the wake of Brown. The result was a short collection of observations
published in 1956 as Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Blight calls the
collection a “prototype” for what Warren would attempt with the later book.
Warren’s interview subjects ranged from senior civil rights leaders to young
student activists. Most were men. He met them in their offices, homes, and
occasionally at a restaurant or tavern. The conversations were relatively informal,
and frequently interrupted by the need to change reels on the tape recorder. Warren
asked most of his subjects a similar set of questions, drawn from the writings of
Gunnar Myrdal, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. He especially homed in on
Du Bois’s idea that African Americans possessed a double consciousness, a kind of
split psyche. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote: “One ever feels his two-ness
—an American, a Negro.”
Warren also questioned his interviewees about Kenneth B. Clark’s critique of
the philosophy of nonviolent protest held by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. An
influential African American psychologist, Clark did not oppose nonviolence per se,
but he said that calling for a nonviolent response to racism and segregation could be
unrealistic and unhealthy, given the hostility and danger black people faced in a
viciously oppressive society. Warren also quizzed his subjects on the idea proposed
by sociologist and economist Gunnar Myrdal, in The American Dilemma, that racial
reconciliation after the demise of slavery would have been more successful had
slaveholders been compensated for their lost property.
Warren used both short excerpts and whole sections of his transcribed
interviews to construct Who Speaks for the Negro? He organized the work in six
chapters, some based on geographic location and some on theme. In the third
chapter, “The Big Brass,” he chronicles his extensive interviews with eight major