Libraries Collaborate on Digital Archive Commemorating 40th Anniversary of MLK's Death
Digitized versions of original reel-to-reel interviews of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement are now available in the Who Speaks for the Negro? Archive. Transcripts, correspondence, & other materials related to Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Penn Warren's interviews for his 1965 book reveal the famous as well as the daily wage earners across the U.S.
Vanderbilt University announced the archive on April 4, 2008, the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and thanked the library community for its cooperation & collaboration in bringing these materials to researchers. Both the University of Kentucky and Yale University digitized original recordings, and Vanderbilt University Library hosts the materials and enjoys support from their Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
Search & use the Who Speaks for the Negro? Archive by Keyword, Interviewee, or Name/Subject:
- Browse a Subject List for interviews about Freedom Rides, Fisk University, Liberalism, School Integration, Sit-ins, & more.
- Find interviews about presidents (Thomas Jefferson, LBJ, JFK, & Abraham Lincoln)
- Listen to interviews with Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Search topics like African American Leadership, education, employment—find Cleveland Ohio in 12 of the interview files.
In the site's Remembrances by Rosanna Warren (now a professor at Boston University) one reads of her family life with guests like Stokely Carmichael and Malcom X and of her father's travels, "a deep inner exploration for a white Southerner...as well as an outer exploration in which so many people struggled and still struggle to bring justice into reality."
