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CollapseWHO SPEAKS FOR THE SOUTH?,by Robert Penn Warren, (Random House) – A concise, informative and hopeful book about the South by a Southerner who knows that area as well as any writer, and Mr. Warren, as most readers ?now (know), is both novelist and historian.
In this book he is the historian and to find out more about the Negro Revolution he traveled thousands of miles in Mississippi, North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee and Georgia, then visited such Northern cities as New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland, conversing extensively with Negro leaders.
These talks were taped and from them Mr. Warren has formulated a most informative and illuminating recital.
He talked with Martin Luther King, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Forman, Bayard Rustin, Aaron Henry, Adam Clayton Powell and Malcolm X., before the latter was assassinated.
He interviewed such writers and businessmen as Ralph Ellison, Judge William Hastel (Hastie), Dr. Kenneth Clark, Carl T. Rowan, John H. Wheeler and James Baldwin.
Also such young leaders as Stokely Carmichael, Robert Moses, Izell Blair and Ruth Turner.
Out of this has come conversations meaningful and enlightening concerning not only the immediate aims of the Civil Rights Movement but also the new problems which have arisen through solution and partial solution of the old ones. Equally important, the effect of all this on our American society.
Finally, we have a brilliant summation of the problems which both White and Negroes face with varying degrees of hope, fear, good will, distrust, confusion and insight.
As remarked previously, Mr. Warren knows his South and its people, and reading this book will help to clear away much of the confusion attending this most vital problem.
News ________ 4/20/64
Yucajpa, Calif
D
(Handwritten notes in italics
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