Free All Along ─ The Robert Penn Warren Interviews

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. Over the course of several months, he traveled the country from the dangerous back roads of rural Mississippi to the streets of America’s northern cities to speak with luminaries such as James Baldwin, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins. Up in Harlem, Warren sat down for a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X that unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.

When it was published in 1965, Who Speaks for the Negro? mixed short excerpts from the transcribed interviews with Warren’s own observations and essays to create a work of literary journalism that documented one of the most dramatic and significant periods of the civil rights timeline.

Now, award-winning authors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis have delved deeply into Penn Warren’s archive to present the first comprehensive and accessible look at a living repository of critical narratives that helped shape the civil rights movement.

Stephen Drury Smith is the executive editor and host of American RadioWorks. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Catherine Ellis is a contributing producer with American RadioWorks®, the highly regarded documentary unit of American Public Media™. She is a founder of Audio Memoir, which chronicles personal stories for families and organizations. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.