Free All Along
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Publisher Description
Featured in the New Yorker's "Page-Turner"
One of Mashable's "17 books every activist should read in 2019"
"This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along." —Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren
A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author
In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.
A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America's civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.
A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Radio producers Smith and Ellis (Say It Plain) compile 20 edited and condensed transcripts from Robert Penn Warren's 1964 series of interviews with civil rights leaders, which he drew upon in writing Who Speaks for the Negro? but which have never before been made public. The title is taken from Warren's interview with novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, who described the civil rights movement as one manifestation of African-American life "that... has developed beyond any restrictions imposed on it." The collection displays the multiplicity of approaches African-Americans took to battling white supremacy, from the Gandhian nonviolent tactics advocated by Martin Luther King Jr., Kenneth Clark, and Bayard Rustin to the more militant positions of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Other interviewees include novelist James Baldwin, educator Septima P. Clark, and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young. Warren is a skilled interviewer, the responses are beautifully complex (at one point, Whitney M. Young Jr. opines, "If we can't change status-seeking and we can't change conformity, at least we can... get people to see that only the hopelessly insecure and inadequate person needs to surround himself with sameness"), and Smith and Ellis provide useful biographical context for each person. This is a fascinating and valuable document of the 1960s.
