In 1930, a cadre of poet-critics known as the Fugitives—white southern loyalists who were wary of the effects of industrial capitalism and hoped to preserve what they saw as the pastoral lifeblood of their native region—published an essay-collection-cum-manifesto called “I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.” One of the book’s essays, “The Briar Patch,” was written by a twenty-five-year-old Rhodes Scholar from Kentucky named Robert Penn Warren, who had helped found the group. In his essay, Warren argued that African-Americans should focus on forming their own agrarian state, a network of black-owned farms that would promote economic independence and eliminate any motive to move north or come into contact with white society. “In the past the Southern negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm,” Warren wrote. “That is where he still chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity.”
Years later, in an interview, Warren said that “The Briar Patch” was a product of “that fatalism that was deeply engrained in the Southern mind.” Warren insisted that he had never been comfortable with segregation, but that, at the time, he could not imagine any other system prevailing in the South—and so, in the essay, he dreamed up what he considered a fair, benign version of it. Whatever pressures shaped “The Briar Patch,” Warren, by the time he gave the interview, had gone from one of the South’s most celebrated writers—his novel “All the King’s Men,” from 1946, won the Pulitzer Prize and was quickly adapted into a movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars—to one of its most incisive critics. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954, Warren compiled a short work of oral history titled “Segregation: The Inner Conflict In the South,” in which he bemoaned the region’s resistance to the Supreme Court’s ruling. In 1961, he published “The Legacy of the Civil War,” a powerful study in mythography that cast the Lost Cause as a fiction deleterious to those who cherish it, converting “defeat into victory, defects into virtues.” For Warren, the problem of fatalism was a recurrent one. “We are the prisoners of our history,” he wrote, in “Segregation.” “Or are we?”
At the start of 1964, Warren met with several leaders of the civil-rights movement. Many were accustomed to treating white reporters with suspicion; in retrospect, the access that they granted Warren seems astonishing. He interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr., in the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in Atlanta; he spent an hour with Malcolm X, in Harlem; and he spoke to Stokely Carmichael, who was still a student at Howard University at the time. Warren also visited Mississippi, entering homes that had been firebombed and riding with voting-rights activists across the Delta plantation country, listening to their stories of being run off the road by police and mob vigilantes.
The result of this reporting and research, “Who Speaks for the Negro?,” was published in 1965. Long and impressionistic, a blend of history, memoir, and reportage, the book is largely a letter to white America; in it, Warren addresses white readers who persisted in seeing the civil-rights leadership as a unified front, expecting there to be a single voice that could represent the entire community of black Americans. He also warns of a backlash to the arrival of black political power and theoretical equality in housing and education. Even those who professed sympathy for the movement, Warren predicted, would discover that they were not ready to live side by side with blacks; true reform would be delayed until “the white man can learn that he can’t deal with the ‘Negro problem’ until he has learned to deal with the white man’s ‘white-man’ problem.” This is a long way from “The Briar Patch.” (In the book, Warren also formally recants his old essay.)
“Who Speaks for the Negro?” is, in some ways, an unclassifiable book, and it did not sell many copies—it was out of print for years, before Yale University Press reissued it, in 2014—though it would prove to be an indispensable resource for scholars of civil-rights historiography. Vanderbilt University recently made all of the interviews Warren conducted for the book available online; now, the New Press has published “Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews,” edited by Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis. The book contains nineteen conversations that Warren completed in 1964, including those with King, Malcolm X, Robert Moses, Roy Wilkins, Septima Poinsette Clark, James Baldwin, Andrew Young, Ralph Ellison, and more. The interviews, presented without Warren’s commentary and digressions, capture the civil-rights movement in its full dimensions—its dissonances, its competing claims, and its determination to bring about what Baldwin called “a great, radical shift in American mores, in the American way of life.”
At the time that Warren conducted the interviews, many activists had begun to reject a philosophy of nonviolence and were drifting toward the more militant stance of black nationalism. Malcolm X urged “a cultural, psychological, philosophical migration back to Africa.” (When Warren brought up this issue with Baldwin, Baldwin replied, “Which Africa would you be thinking of? Are you thinking of Senegal or are you thinking of Freetown? And if you are thinking of any of these places, what do you know about them?”) King, in his interview with Warren, cautioned against confusing a society that had merely desegregated, or found a way to accommodate tokenism within the status quo, with one that aspires to “the realm of actual integration, which deals with mutual acceptance—genuine intergroup, interpersonal living.” Warren, to his credit, recognized the challenge that integration posed to black identity; while civil-rights leaders were eager to win rights and access to ordinary privileges—swimming pools and mortgage loans and on and on—there was a concomitant fear that joining the white mainstream and entering the culture that oppressed them would involve a vital loss of self. Africa was tantalizing yet remote. But integrating into “the middle-class white culture,” as Moses, who oversaw the voting-rights struggle in Mississippi, put it, was not appealing either, “since that seems to be in vital need of some kind of renewal.”
The interview subject whose beliefs most closely aligned with Warren’s own evolving views was Bayard Rustin, the pacifist leader of the War Resisters League, who helped plan the March on Washington. Rustin was an integrationist. He told Warren that the civil-rights movement would bring about a fundamental restructuring of the American political and social order, leading to antipoverty measures and the creation of a broad interracial coalition. “Our destiny is here, not in Africa,” he said. “It is in cooperating with white people, not separating ourselves from them and thinking we’re different. It is in working with them, and being the catalyst for basic social change in this country.” In “Who Speaks for the Negro?,” Warren seized on this thinking. He wrote, “I am confident that the effect of the Negro Revolution may be redemptive for our society—in the sense that Bayard Rustin suggests when he refers to the Negro Movement as a ‘catalytic.’ ”
For how long this confidence lasted we cannot say: in the last decades of his life, Warren, who died in 1989, mostly concentrated on writing verse. Yet, his quarrel with fatalism returned. In a series of lectures he gave in 1974, later published as “Democracy and Poetry,” Warren surveyed the national mood and seemed to allow, if tacitly, that the faith expressed in “Who Speaks?” had been mislaid, noting that “the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”
