Who Speaks for the Negro?

Vanderbilt University's Robert Penn Warren Center recently organized an effort to digitize and make publicly available the forgotten recordings of some powerful interviews. Some hundreds of hours of interviews.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Robert Penn Warren lugged a giant reel-t0-reel tape recorder to interviews with people involved in the movement, including participants like Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Ellison (pictured to the right), Stokely Carmichael, and James Baldwin among others.

After the poet laureate's death, Yale University and the University of Kentucky each ended up with reels of the tapes. Vanderbilt recently organized their digital preservation.

Access to the digitized recordings is free, and there are partial transcripts for some of the recordings. Find out more at http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/