Along with Radio First Termer I have always had a deep interest and compassion for the Civil Rights Movement, This Website offers an amazing opportunity to delve deeper into understanding the people who made it happen.
The Who Speaks for the Negro? website is a digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. The original materials are held at the University of Kentucky and Yale University Libraries. We are indebted to both of these institutions for their willingness to share their collections in order to create a full digital record of Warren’s research for the book. Robert Penn Warren’s children, Gabriel Warren and Rosanna Warren, have generously given their permission for this material to be made available publicly.
The archive consists of digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees as well as print materials related to the project. All of the print materials appear on the website in two versions: an image of the original document which is not searchable and a re-transcribed document which is searchable. When a search is implemented, the searched word or phrase will be highlighted within the re-typed document; the user will need to scroll through the document to find the highlighted search term.