Who Speaks for the Negro?
Original Random House cover for Robert Penn Warren's book Who Speaks for the Negro?
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| Author | Robert Penn Warren |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Random House; reprinted by Yale University Press in 2014 |
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Publication date
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1965 |
| Pages | 454 |
| Preceded by | Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964) |
| Followed by | Selected Poems: New and Old 1923–1966 (1966) |
Who Speaks for the Negro? is a 1965 book of interviews by Robert Penn Warren conducted with Civil Rights Movement activists. The book was reissued by Yale University Press in 2014.
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.
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