Free All Along

The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews

Stephen Drury Smith, Catherine Ellis

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781595588180
• eBook ISBN: 9781595589828
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• A Note about Transcripts
• Joe Carter
• Clarie Collins Harvey
• Aaron Henry
• Robert P. Moses
• Charles Evers
• Ralph Ellison
• Ezell A. Blair Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Lucy Thornton, and Jean Wheeler
• Kenneth B. Clark
• James M. Lawson Jr.
• Andrew Young
• Septima P. Clark
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Wyatt Tee Walker
• Roy Wilkins
• Whitney M. Young Jr.
• James Baldwin
• Ruth Turner Perot
• Malcolm X
• Bayard Rustin
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Editors
• Publishing in the Public Interest