Birmingham News Review searchable text

10/24/65

Warren, others speak for Negro

          WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO?  by Robert Penn Warren  

(Random House,  $5.95)

BirminghamNews

          ROBERT PENN WARREN, a native southerner who is poet and novelist as well as essayist, lets the leaders of the Negro Revolution (“one of the dramatic events of the American story”) speak for the Negro in this book, which is the result of many tape-recorded talks in a number of states in both the North and the South.

          Alabamais not included in his travels, although Birmingham and Alabama are mentioned frequently in the conversations.

          The author himself also speaks for the Negro, and his “settings” and “commentaries” are skillfully woven into the transcripts of the interviews.  His conclusion:  “It would be sentimentality to think that our society can be changed easily and without pain.  It would be worse sentimentality to think that it can be changed without some pain to our particular selves—black and white.  It would be realism to think that that pain would be a reasonable price to pay for what we all, selfishly, might get out of it.”  -- HOWARD CREED, Birmingham-Southern College.

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(Handwritten notes in italics)