Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews - Hardcover

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"An anthology that arguably holds more contemporary importance as an historical document than the original release."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

In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.

A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America’s civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.

A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.