Fifty Years Later: Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?

Fifty years ago, in May 1965, Random House published Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro? The book was the culmination of Warren’s effort “to find out something, first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making the Negro Revolution what it is—one of the dramatic events of the American story” (xxxiii). Throughout 1964, Warren traveled South and North, tape recorder in hand, to converse with black leaders, students, and artists engaged in the revolution. Then he wrote a book that documented his process of interviewing these individuals, of studying the revolution’s various political and philosophical thrusts. Who Speaks for the Negro? sounds like an anachronistic title, which is part of what makes this volume so important. Reading it on the subway I’ve found myself minding the book’s bold, eye-catching cover. People don’t say “Negro” today. Nor do we ever recall the civil rights movement as a “Negro Revolution.” But back when African Americans called themselves Negroes, Robert Penn Warren was one of their sharpest white allies. Who Speaks for the Negro? is therefore a precious artifact of America’s recent past. It is a snapshot of certain ways in which people intelligently advocated against white supremacy and legalized segregation in 1964, before certain customs, laws, and words changed. In this book, we find Warren synthesizing a series of intricately related debates over the nature and future of black American experience. It should be read as an important reference volume in American history, a document that can help guide our activism today and in the future. We who believe that black lives matter can never lose sight of Negro memories.