What do you think?
Rate this book
Who Speaks for the Negro?
In 1964, Robert Penn Warren interviewed leaders, activists, and artists engaged in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. His interviewees included well-known figures such as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and James Baldwin, as well as lesser-known individuals whose names might otherwise be lost to history. Transcripts from these interviews, combined with Warren’s reflections on the movement, were first published in 1965 as Who Speaks for the Negro? This unique text in the history of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement serves as a powerful oral history of an all-important struggle. A new introduction by David W. Blight places the book in historical perspective.“Warren’s book remains a luminous volume about race, racism, the South, black America, and our national destiny. We ignore or forget his work at our peril.”—Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University “Not exactly a stroll down memory lane and certainly not a song to sing, yet Who Speaks for the Negro? brings back a question one would have thought already answered. We still search America’s soul for how to and who to include. This is still a book worthy of your time and somehow still a part of ours.”—Nikki Giovanni“Fifty years later, we have this archival treasure that demonstrates why the Civil Rights Movement in fact gave our land its second equality, life, and liberty movement.”—Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr.
572 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 1965
39 people are currently reading
225 people want to read
About the author
Robert Penn Warren
336 books998 followersRobert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 5, 2022
a marvelously written (of course) source book for many aspects of the Negro fight for rights in 1964 ... interviews with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and James Baldwin, as well as many lesser-known individuals
a few excerpts ...
... Negroes point with pride to Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, who, after being thrown off the plantation where for eighteen years she had been a sharecropper, learned to take jailings and harassments and beatings, and wound up as a candidate for Congress on the Freedom Democratic ticket, in the Second Congressional District, and as a delegate of the same party to the Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City.
... the white man is afraid his deeds are going to follow him, and he feels that once the Negro gets in power, the Negro is going to remember all of the dirty deals that he has gotten from the white community.
... The house is set near the street, parallel to it, and this bedroom is on the street side. I hear a car pass. I think of the guard peeking through the slit in the curtain. The walls are clapboard, thin. These walls have been raked before with fire from a high-powered rifle.
... going down to register and the Registrar disappears. And so they stay all day, and somebody comes and says, “Well, we’ve got to close up now, come back tomorrow.”
... in order to justify slavery the early Americans found it necessary to dehumanize and completely emasculate the Negro.
a few excerpts ...
... Negroes point with pride to Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, who, after being thrown off the plantation where for eighteen years she had been a sharecropper, learned to take jailings and harassments and beatings, and wound up as a candidate for Congress on the Freedom Democratic ticket, in the Second Congressional District, and as a delegate of the same party to the Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City.
... the white man is afraid his deeds are going to follow him, and he feels that once the Negro gets in power, the Negro is going to remember all of the dirty deals that he has gotten from the white community.
... The house is set near the street, parallel to it, and this bedroom is on the street side. I hear a car pass. I think of the guard peeking through the slit in the curtain. The walls are clapboard, thin. These walls have been raked before with fire from a high-powered rifle.
... going down to register and the Registrar disappears. And so they stay all day, and somebody comes and says, “Well, we’ve got to close up now, come back tomorrow.”
... in order to justify slavery the early Americans found it necessary to dehumanize and completely emasculate the Negro.
June 13, 2016
Nihil novi sub sole
On the one hand, Robert Penn Warren's foray into the civil rights movement of the 1960s is a rather exhilarating read, as it gives one the feeling, almost, of observing what it was like to live in that time. Warren achieves this through his masterful integration (haha) of interviews with leading blacks in the civil rights movement. There is a sort of read-it-in-the-papers proximity and "realness" to what has largely become a sanitized, glorified, and fictionalized period of American history. Hearing directly about the conflict, the disagreement, and the controversy which marked the movement of the 1960s is a refreshing break from the image of King and Lewis and Parks and Tubman and Lincoln and Marx and Santa Claus marching together across the Edmund Pettis bridge while cops and Klansman burned down a black orphanage in the background. It is also fascinating to see the degree to which issues which vex us today - de facto segregation, reparations, police violence - were issues just as burning back then.
On the other hand, Robert Penn Warren writes with the simpering spinelessness so typical of that most foolish and pathetic creature, the penitent Southerner. His pleading for a better society in which the "American dream" is fully realized flies in the face of the very verisimilitude which he endeavors to create through the interview-style approach he has adopted. He cannot help but fawn over those figures whom he admires - King, Rustin, Robert Moses - while demonize through editorializing those with whom he disagrees - Powell, Little, Carmichael. Warren makes little effort to hide his bias, which would be forgivable were he not so insistent that he has no biases.
Overall, Who Speaks for the Negro? is an excellent synthesis of many different trains of thought which were coming to a head in the 1960s. I believe that this text would be enlightening for anyone interested in this period of history, although if you are not a student of the 1960s civil rights movement you'd do well to keep "Google" open to check up on the names of certain figures and events - Warren doesn't provide much context. That being said, Who Speaks for the Negro? is not a traditional history text and is not a good overview of the period. Rather, it is a fascinating look into how a white liberal perceived the civil rights movement.
In the introduction, Warren recounts his answer to the question "What makes you think the blacks won't just lie to you?" to which he replies, "Lying is also a kind of truth." That is an oddly apt summation of this book.
On the one hand, Robert Penn Warren's foray into the civil rights movement of the 1960s is a rather exhilarating read, as it gives one the feeling, almost, of observing what it was like to live in that time. Warren achieves this through his masterful integration (haha) of interviews with leading blacks in the civil rights movement. There is a sort of read-it-in-the-papers proximity and "realness" to what has largely become a sanitized, glorified, and fictionalized period of American history. Hearing directly about the conflict, the disagreement, and the controversy which marked the movement of the 1960s is a refreshing break from the image of King and Lewis and Parks and Tubman and Lincoln and Marx and Santa Claus marching together across the Edmund Pettis bridge while cops and Klansman burned down a black orphanage in the background. It is also fascinating to see the degree to which issues which vex us today - de facto segregation, reparations, police violence - were issues just as burning back then.
On the other hand, Robert Penn Warren writes with the simpering spinelessness so typical of that most foolish and pathetic creature, the penitent Southerner. His pleading for a better society in which the "American dream" is fully realized flies in the face of the very verisimilitude which he endeavors to create through the interview-style approach he has adopted. He cannot help but fawn over those figures whom he admires - King, Rustin, Robert Moses - while demonize through editorializing those with whom he disagrees - Powell, Little, Carmichael. Warren makes little effort to hide his bias, which would be forgivable were he not so insistent that he has no biases.
Overall, Who Speaks for the Negro? is an excellent synthesis of many different trains of thought which were coming to a head in the 1960s. I believe that this text would be enlightening for anyone interested in this period of history, although if you are not a student of the 1960s civil rights movement you'd do well to keep "Google" open to check up on the names of certain figures and events - Warren doesn't provide much context. That being said, Who Speaks for the Negro? is not a traditional history text and is not a good overview of the period. Rather, it is a fascinating look into how a white liberal perceived the civil rights movement.
In the introduction, Warren recounts his answer to the question "What makes you think the blacks won't just lie to you?" to which he replies, "Lying is also a kind of truth." That is an oddly apt summation of this book.
November 11, 2025
Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro? must be seen in its context to be appreciated and understood. Warren was a famous, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and award-winning poet by the time he wrote and researched this non-fiction work.
Warren had a long history of expressing grave reservations about racial integration for practical and cultural reasons. By 1964, when Warren carried out this work, he had converted to a hopeful advocate. Warren interviewed dozens of civil rights leaders, activists, scholars, and artists as he constructed a snapshot of the movement's leadership.
The two most arresting interviews are with Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Warren considers them at least peers, and their conversations reflect that respect and their similar, literary conceptions of reality.
The book wraps up with a remarkable chapter that serves as a testament to Warren's own transformation. Warren writes openly and critically of whites and blacks from the North and the South. He sees racial progress, fundamentally, as a matter of personal change, a redemption of each person, not just in their feelings toward others, which are too subjective, but in understanding their own frailties. Change is a recognition of both the rights and the humanity in others no matter what we feel toward them.
Robert Penn Warren's own journey is one of hope, a documentation of the possible. In a polarized age, where things feel hopeless, Warren, and so many others, reveal at least the potential of change. If America could get better in race relations--and it has gotten better--perhaps it can get better in other ways, but that betterment will only come through our own choices.
Warren had a long history of expressing grave reservations about racial integration for practical and cultural reasons. By 1964, when Warren carried out this work, he had converted to a hopeful advocate. Warren interviewed dozens of civil rights leaders, activists, scholars, and artists as he constructed a snapshot of the movement's leadership.
The two most arresting interviews are with Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Warren considers them at least peers, and their conversations reflect that respect and their similar, literary conceptions of reality.
The book wraps up with a remarkable chapter that serves as a testament to Warren's own transformation. Warren writes openly and critically of whites and blacks from the North and the South. He sees racial progress, fundamentally, as a matter of personal change, a redemption of each person, not just in their feelings toward others, which are too subjective, but in understanding their own frailties. Change is a recognition of both the rights and the humanity in others no matter what we feel toward them.
Robert Penn Warren's own journey is one of hope, a documentation of the possible. In a polarized age, where things feel hopeless, Warren, and so many others, reveal at least the potential of change. If America could get better in race relations--and it has gotten better--perhaps it can get better in other ways, but that betterment will only come through our own choices.
April 29, 2022
While at times the writing can be a bit pedantic, this was an interesting narrative of those involved with the Civil Rights Movement, specifically during the year 1964. What I think I admired most, is that Mr Warren didn't let the North off the hook, as others of the time did. All in all, this is a fascinating look of the Civil Rights Movement as it was happening, and a white intellectual's navigation through the minefield that is race.
PS: I highly recommend the compilation of select transcripts of Mr Warren's interviews Free All Along as a companion to this book.
PS: I highly recommend the compilation of select transcripts of Mr Warren's interviews Free All Along as a companion to this book.
June 28, 2021
This book is a tough read. The author is writes in a very deep and poetic way at times. He has a strong command vocabulary and I had to look up some words. Amazing interviews with some absolute legends of the civil rights movement and some other people who were not so well known. A Must read to understand today’s climate.
September 14, 2023
Robert Penn Warren partait à la la rencontre des Noirs américains il y a une cinquantaine d'années. Avec cette enquête, il livre un témoignage puissant
January 14, 2017
Ranks behind Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 and The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle if you're looking for well organized primary sources to learn from or teach with....
Still, this is a worthy book if you're interested in the Civil Rights Movement as it stood around 1963/4. The press describes this as akin to having a book of first hand interviews from the American or Russian Revolution, and that's not far from a stretch.
Who Speaks is a landmark that I can't believe it's taken me this long to read, especially given Warren's literary pedigree. If you're preparing to dive into this one, I highly recommend reading or audiobooking All the King's Men because it has very incisive moments that reveal how Warren things about the human condition.
The eminent historian August Meier wrote a tough review on this, saying it didn't reveal much to those who were in the know (and he was probably right), but if nothing else the last chapter is a real keeper. This is where Warren writes in his own voice. A southern voice. A voice that speaks of idealism, justice, and doing what is right. Not right in some abstract sense, but right in terms of self-interest. Pure pragmatism here, and that's the American way.
Lastly, FWIW, David Blight did a knock-up job on the intro, definatly got me in the mood to dive into this book.
Still, this is a worthy book if you're interested in the Civil Rights Movement as it stood around 1963/4. The press describes this as akin to having a book of first hand interviews from the American or Russian Revolution, and that's not far from a stretch.
Who Speaks is a landmark that I can't believe it's taken me this long to read, especially given Warren's literary pedigree. If you're preparing to dive into this one, I highly recommend reading or audiobooking All the King's Men because it has very incisive moments that reveal how Warren things about the human condition.
The eminent historian August Meier wrote a tough review on this, saying it didn't reveal much to those who were in the know (and he was probably right), but if nothing else the last chapter is a real keeper. This is where Warren writes in his own voice. A southern voice. A voice that speaks of idealism, justice, and doing what is right. Not right in some abstract sense, but right in terms of self-interest. Pure pragmatism here, and that's the American way.
Lastly, FWIW, David Blight did a knock-up job on the intro, definatly got me in the mood to dive into this book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews