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January 1, 2019
An anthology reinvigorates Robert Penn Warren's long-overlooked collection of civil rights interviews.Published in 1965, Warren's oral history Who Speaks for the Negro? received mostly lukewarm reviews and little fanfare. Among critics, the 450-page volume of interviews was billed as everything from "the very best inside report" on the civil rights movement to "boring." The interviewees include Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, and the volume brims with Warren's own reflections, revealing as much about the author as it did the movement (critics claimed it had nothing new to say). After decades of fading from memory, Yale University Press reprinted Who Speaks? in 2014. Here, Smith and Ellis (co-editors: Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity, 2010, etc.) present a modified, highly relevant version of Warren's enormous undertaking. "In this edited anthology," they write, "the focus is on the interviews themselves." Not all of the interviews are retained--but two are added: Septima T. Clark and Andrew Young--and Smith and Ellis stripped away the poet's personal observations and digressions, returning to the raw transcripts and allowing the stand-alone interviews to drive home their own measures of insight. One example is the opening interview with the Rev. Joe Carter, the first African-American to register to vote in Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish. What is now published as pure monologue describes in powerful detail Carter's 1963 experience of harassment and arrest by a mob of whites as he defiantly attempted to register. Among other changes, the editors shed Warren's interview titles, replacing them with the subject, date, and location followed by a page of "biographical and historical context."It's clear the editors made dozens of nips and tucks to maximize their stated goal of "clear and engaging reading" while remaining "faithful to the spirit and substance of the conversations." The result is an anthology that arguably holds more contemporary importance as a historical document than the original release.

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December 1, 2018
At the height of the civil rights movement, renowned southern writer Robert Penn Warren published Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), an annotated selection of interviews he conducted with black leaders of the era. It was one of many entries in Warren's oeuvre dedicated to wrestling with divisive topics such as segregation and nonviolent resistance. Warren's commentary and reflections required abbreviating the full content of his interviews, and the book wasn't a best-seller. But the interviews are of value, so the editors of this edition have dutifully restored them to the fullest extent possible, ordered them chronologically, and added interviews with politician Andrew Young and activist Septima Clark, which Warren had excluded. The result is 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. Of additional interest will be the online audio archives of all the interviews, hosted by Vanderbilt University.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)