Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews

Description

In 1964, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out to interview leaders of the civil rights movement, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and others. Published in 1965, Who Speaks for the Negro? Mixed short excerpts from the interviews with Warren's observations to document the most significant period of the civil rights timeline. Now award-winning authors Smith and Ellis have delved into Warren's archive to present a comprehensive and accessible look at the narratives that helped shape the civil rights movement.

Stephen Drury Smith is the executive editor and host of APM Reports (R), the acclaimed documentary unit of American Public Media. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Catherine Ellis is an award-winning broadcast and podcast journalist, and the founder of Audio Memoir. Ellis holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, where her research compared the way whites and African Americans in Louisiana remember the Jim Crow era. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. They are both co-editors of Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches, and Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity and (with Mary Marshall Clark and Peter Bearman) of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed, all published by The New Press.

Praise for Free All Along: Featured in the New Yorker's "Page-Turner" One of Mashable's "17 books every activist should read in 2019" "The conversations feel immediate and are thoroughly engaging, and it seems as though this was organically the case; when Warren interviewed Malcolm X, he was in such high demand that he committed to only 15 minutes for the interview, but ended up staying for over an hour. Free All Along is the book Warren should have published: It's a product of careful listening to people more than qualified to speak for themselves." -The Progresive Populist "Warren is a skilled interviewer, the responses are beautifully complex. . . . [This is] a fascinating and valuable document of the 1960s." -Publisher Weekly "An anthology that arguably holds more contemporary importance as an historical document than the original release." -Kirkus Reviews "A lively, conversational transcription, one that faithfully recreates the energy in the room as Warren questions influential writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, yields to Martin Luther King Jr.'s loquacious speaking style, and prods Malcolm X on the role of Elijah Muhammad in shaping his views. " -Booklist "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 "There are times when voices from the past speak directly to our present. Free All Along is a rare and electrifying document, one that reveals the enduring connections between the long struggle for civil rights in the last century to the fight for justice in our own." -Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of What Truth Sounds Like Praise for Say It Plain: "The speeches...collectively provide a sweeping perspective on evolving issues of black identity in the struggle for equality. " -Booklist "The electrifying speeches-all recorded at live events-focus directly on the questions, the struggles, the defeats and the triumphs of the 1960s to present-day America. A new depth to oral and written history, readers and listeners should consider this a great resource to add to their own personal collection." -The Saginaw News