Free All Along

The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews

By: Stephen Drury Smith (Editor), Catherine Ellis (Editor)

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Hardcover | 14 February 2019

At a Glance

Hardcover
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.5 x 13.9 x 2.54

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In 1964, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the civil rights movement. Warren was a Southern white man who opposed Jim Crow segregation. He wanted to find out, first hand, about the people behind the "Negro Revolution."

Over the course of several months, Warren traveled the murderous back roads of rural Mississippi with young voting rights activists. He interviewed the leading lights of the movement, such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Roy Wilkins. Up in Harlem, Warren sat down for a 15-minute appointment with Malcolm X that unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.

The interviews are frank and revealing, the work of an ambivalent southerner living in Connecticut. He was trying to understand the region he left behind, the country as a whole, and the African Americans who were fighting for change. It was also something of an act of personal contrition; as a young man, Warren had held conventionally racist views about the virtues of segregation.

When his 1964 journey was complete, Warren published his findings in Look magazine and in a 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren mixed short excerpts from his transcribed interviews with his own observations and essays to create a work of literary journalism that emerged from one of the most dramatic and significant periods of the civil rights timeline. Who Speaks for the Negro? is long out of print, familiar only to scholars of history and literature.

This book will present a carefully crafted selection of these remarkable conversations between one of America's most revered writers and some of the most influential men and women of the freedom struggle. Warren was the first poet laureate of the United States and the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize both for fiction and (twice) for poetry. This collection will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive and accessible look at Warren's project and the story of its making.

Industry Reviews

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

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