Book Review/Heather Seggel

Who Listens to the Negro?

Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews (The New Press) is a book as notable for its origin story as the contents within its covers. In 1964, Warren, a Pulitzer Prize winner for both fiction and poetry, ventured out with a tape recorder the size of a suitcase to interview African-Americans involved in the civil rights movement for Look magazine. Some of the interviews appeared there, but Warren used excerpts from several for a book he intended to be a magnum opus, which he titled Who Speaks For the Negro? Published in 1965, it got a lukewarm reception, a grave disappointment for the author.

It’s possible he was so invested in this work because, as a young man, Warren favored segregation; in 1930 he wrote an essay arguing in favor of it that haunted him for decades after. By 1965, however, people were either clearly interested in civil rights, in which case his new treatise didn’t offer much that people hadn’t already seen, or they were not interested at all. Warren’s decision to emphasize his own musings and only use quotes pulled from his interviews also leads one to wonder if his answer to, “Who speaks for the Negro?” was, at least in part, “Me, pick me!” Despite writing about race extensively since his awakening, readers weren’t having it.

The interviews themselves, though, are fascinating material. Editors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis compiled a gold mine of material here and, but for the lightest of edits, we get to listen in on Warren’s conversations with, among others, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and Septima Clark. Fifty-five years on, it’s disturbing to see how little progress we’ve made in many respects; the main difference in discussions about civil rights today is the addition of hashtags. Police abuse of power, automation making jobs obsolete and creating a perennial underclass, and arguments over the “right” way to protest, are all vibrant topics here.

In 1964, part of the debate was over whether farmers and other generally less well-educated folk should be allowed to speak on their own behalf within the context of the movement. While Warren talks to a bunch of big names and intellectual giants here, some of the most interesting stories come from people who simply showed up to try and vote, only to be arrested, and as a result found their way into activism. Others applied their entrepreneurial skills to organizing not just protests or voter drives, but preparing for the inevitable aftermath with bail, or food and clothes for those just let out of jail.

Warren asks similar questions of many of his subjects; he’s particularly invested in a theory that black Americans are split within themselves between an African homeland where they don’t belong and an America where their options are assimilation or continued despair. While seeing the same question over and over can be annoying, the range of answers is illuminating. Even though each of the interview subjects talks one on one with Warren, the longer you read the greater sense there is of them all being in conversation with one another. Whitney Young, a long-time organizer, deftly kicks Warren’s question aside, noting, “Africa doesn’t want our caseload.” He’s also open about how Malcolm X was seen by many as useful insofar as he upset white people with his rhetoric, but that many blacks did not take him seriously or intend to follow his example.

It’s painful to read such lively discourse from people now lost to us, many the victims of violence, who at bottom were only asking for equal treatment under the law. But 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.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2019

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