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  • Fifty Years Later: Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?
  • Benji de la Piedra
Who Speaks for the Negro?By Robert Penn Warren. New York: Random House, 1965. Reprinted with introduction by David W. Blight. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 454 pp. Softbound, $25.00.
Robert Penn Warren’s “Who Speaks for the Negro?”: An Archival Collection. Digital archive created and designed by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 2015. http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/

Fifty years ago, in May 1965, Random House published Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?The book was the culmination of Warren’s effort “to find out something, first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making the Negro Revolution what it is—one of the dramatic events of the American story” (xxxiii). Throughout 1964, Warren traveled South and North, tape recorder in hand, to converse with black leaders, students, and artists engaged in the revolution. Then he wrote a book that documented his process of interviewing these individuals, of studying the revolution’s various political and philosophical thrusts.

Who Speaks for the Negro?sounds like an anachronistic title, which is part of what makes this volume so important. Reading it on the subway I’ve found myself minding the book’s bold, eye-catching cover. People don’t say “Negro” today. Nor do we ever recall the civil rights movement as a “Negro Revolution.” But back when African Americans called themselves Negroes, Robert Penn Warren was one of their sharpest white allies. Who Speaks for the Negro?is therefore a precious artifact of America’s recent past. It is a snapshot of certain ways in which people intelligently advocated against white supremacy and legalized segregation in 1964, before certain customs, laws, and words changed. In this book, we find Warren synthesizing a series of intricately related debates over the nature and future of black American experience. It should be read as an important reference volume in American history, a document that can help guide our activism today and in the future. We who believe that black lives matter can never lose sight of Negro memories. [End Page 374]

In 2014, Yale University Press reissued Warren’s book with two illuminating additions: a new introduction by the incisive scholar of African American history, David W. Blight, and a note on the Who Speaks for the Negro?Digital Archive, which is maintained by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University (http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu).

Before the reissue, Who Speaksalready stood as an important text for scholars and general readers interested in the proliferation of diverse ideas that the civil rights movement produced. With these new components—particularly the note on the digital archive—Warren’s groundbreaking project has reasserted itself as required reading, not only for students of the Second Reconstruction, but also for anyone interested in practicing oral history with the means and ends of antioppression.

In this essay I will briefly outline the merits of the book and the website that together make the Who Speaksproject. Taken together, these two branches of Warren’s project present a rich and valuable tool for students and teachers of oral history methodology.

The Book

Robert Penn Warren knew that his project was unprecedented, that it would elude the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. In his original foreword to Who Speakshe wrote, “This book is not a history, a sociological analysis, an anthropological study, or a Who’s Whoof the Negro Revolution. It is a record of my attempt to find out what I could find out. It is primarily a transcript of conversations, with settings and commentaries” (xxxiii). In other words, the book is an impressive work of oral history, although Warren never described it as such.

Who Speaksis a soundly constructed book, grounded in Warren’s interview transcripts and held together by the author’s field notes and his wide-ranging personal and civic meditations. Its six chapters are arranged in a logical progression, and each one stands on its own as a self-contained exploration of the civil rights movement’s relation...

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