AS FLANNERY O’CONNOR suffered her final, agonizing months in Milledgeville, Robert Penn Warren sat down with James Baldwin and a tape recorder. It was April 1964—Baldwin had just finished a play inspired by the murder of Emmett Till named Blues for Mister Charlie, and Warren was in the midst of a new project, a book about black leadership and civil rights. There was much to cover. Since 1955, African Americans had launched a push for constitutional rights unprecedented in American history. Early signs of the campaign had exploded in Montgomery—which, of course, Warren had failed to mention in Segregation: The Inner Conflict—but then caught fire in Greensboro, Richmond, Nashville, and other cities in 1960 as black college students entered white lunch counters and refused to leave, often provoking bitter, racist attacks. Such assaults embarrassed Warren even as they sparked renewed interest nationally in civil rights, an interest that continued to generate smoke and flame in 1961 as a series of widely publicized integrated bus trips, or “Freedom Rides,” rolled through the Deep South, crisscrossing the region and provoking outrageous displays of white violence in forgettable places like Anniston, Alabama, where a bus was torched, and Montgomery, where mobs attacked riders. The inspiration and planning for these protests came from different organizations and different leaders but were invariably portrayed in the northern press as part of a larger, organized “movement,” a term that first began to gain national currency in 1962. Warren became interested in writing something about the “movement” in 1963, in part due to the kaleidoscope of black organizations that had been formed to lead it, groups like the United Defense League, formed in Baton Rouge in 1953; the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed in Montgomery in 1955; the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, formed in Birmingham in 1956; and the Inter-Civic Council, formed in Tallahassee in 1956. In 1957, longtime civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, himself a member of an organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), lobbied Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent black ministers to form a group charged with coordinating the bus boycotts across the South, a project that inspired the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC emerged as a prominent force in southern racial politics for the next decade, in part due to the charisma and eloquence of King, but still failed to unite the various protest strands in the region. For example, students tired of answering to senior leadership in the SCLC formed their own organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. Soon thereafter, yet another civil rights group took center stage, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), orchestrating the Freedom Rides in 1961. By the close of 1962, proponents of unity in Mississippi called for an umbrella group to bring CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the older, more established NAACP together, this time leading to the formation of the Council of Federated Organizations, an entity that enjoyed some success but ultimately failed to dampen the institutional pluralism then rampant in southern black protest circles.1
The simmering alphabet soup of black organizations behind the “movement” intrigued Warren, not least because it pointed to a political landscape that was at once decentralized, diverse, and populated with precisely the kind of “individual variety” that he had heralded as a bulwark against “standardization and anonymity” in the plural South. Warren named his new project Who Speaks for the Negro? The title oozed ambivalence, almost as if composed to underscore black divisions—divisions that were not necessarily known to whites in the North, who tended to associate black leadership with one man, Martin Luther King, Jr. King had worked diligently to project a united black front in his speeches and writings, including a memoir of demonstrations in Birmingham published in June 1964 entitled Why We Can’t Wait. In his memoir, King told the Birmingham story with authorial surety—and singularity—casting the movement in the South as an expression of a cohesive black will that had manifested itself in a determination to face police dogs, fire hoses, and terrorist attacks. Although King had been only one of many actors in the Birmingham campaign, he retold events in a unified, almost Homeric style, referring to African Americans in the singular by noting repeatedly that “the Negro” had grown tired of waiting for Brown’s promise, become frustrated with federal dawdling, and was now awakening from “a stupor of inaction” to sound “a declaration of freedom with his marching feet across the pages of newspapers, the television screens, and the magazines.”2
Warren was dubious. His title questioned King’s presumption of singularity, suggesting instead that there were many African American perspectives and many African American leaders, some of whom disagreed with King on who precisely “the Negro” was and what precisely “he” wanted. In fact, Warren’s title evoked an earlier anthology of fourteen essays edited by Howard University historian Rayford Logan in 1944 entitled What the Negro Wants, another singular reference to black America that Warren seemed eager to engage. Logan’s volume enlisted a diverse panel of speakers, including Roy Wilkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, all of whom joined in a unanimous call to end racial segregation in the American South, a show of solidarity that shocked whites at the time, even liberals who did not anticipate the kind of overwhelming hostility to Jim Crow that the collection’s contributors expressed.3
Warren’s interlocutors told a different, more fractured tale. Some lobbied for immediate integration, others for gradual change. Some argued for separatism, others for pluralism, and yet others for vague, unrealizable objectives that Warren took not to be genuine bids for reform so much as opportunities to rant angrily against the South and the United States. Rather than identify a common thread running through black politics, Warren explored dissensions, underscored disputes, and highlighted differences of opinion regarding tactics and goals hiding behind unifying slogans like the “civil rights movement.” The end result was a 454-page Tower of Babel that suggested no one “spoke” for African Americans nor did African Americans necessarily agree on what they wanted or believed. The heroes of the study, to the extent there were any, proved to be blacks supportive of gradual reform, black self-help, and pluralism, themes Warren had long endorsed himself. Meanwhile, the least sympathetic characters were those with the most defiant ideas and the fewest realizable solutions.4
James Baldwin emerged as one of Warren’s most eloquent, and complicated, interlocutors. On the one hand, Baldwin seemed to argue for integration, or a world in which race “would count for nothing.” On the other, he made a strong case for the importance of preserving a distinctly black perspective on America, its history, and its shortcomings, values that Baldwin found tangled up with “centuries of cruelty and bad faith and genocide and fear.” African Americans, argued Baldwin, should not go quietly into the white mainstream, but rather their history and their voices should be celebrated, for they had developed a critical perspective on America that was valuable and worth preserving.5
Baldwin even hinted that blacks possessed superior traits, beyond simply a more critical lens on the American experience, traits like “sensuality” that whites lacked, as well as a capacity “to respect and rejoice in the force of life, or life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” Warren found some aspects of this view compelling, others ridiculous. “On the matter of sex,” observed Warren, “some of Baldwin’s pronouncements are difficult to reconcile with one another. All his comments on the defect of white sexuality, etc., clearly carry the implication of some happy norm of Negro success in this department,” a norm that Warren called into question. “What all the studies show,” argued Warren, “is that Negroes, given the same psychic strains react exactly as white people do.”6
More interesting to Warren were Baldwin’s thoughts on diversity, on the desire to maintain a distinct black perspective, independent of white mainstream values. “In the last few years,” stated Warren, “there is a movement toward an acceptance of and a pride in negro identity,” a movement that Warren related to earlier efforts, first mounted by W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the century, by blacks to “identify” with “American Negro culture as opposed to American white culture,” or what Warren rephrased as “the Western European American white tradition.” Of course, Warren had been interested in this point—and in Du Bois—since his 1929 essay “The Briar Patch,” which declared Jim Crow instrumental in developing an independent black “art.” Baldwin reviled Jim Crow, to be sure, but conceded that “it was very hard” for him to “accept Western European values” because “they didn’t accept me.” “No matter how many showers you take,” he continued, “no matter what you do, these Western values simply—absolutely resist and reject you. So that inevitably at some point you turn away from them or you re-examine them.” Although Baldwin’s turn from white culture seemed to stem from white rejection—a point that distinguished him from Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, who argued for an appreciation of black traditions independent of white acceptance or rejection—his sense that blacks were engaged in a constant reassessment of America was a notion all three shared. They agreed that African Americans possessed a more honest, clear-eyed view of mainstream American society than did whites. “The slaves who, you know, who adopted the bloody cross,” explained Baldwin to Warren, “did know one thing, they knew the masters could not—those masters could not be Christians because Christians couldn’t have treated them that way. You know what I mean—this rejection has been at the very heart of the American Negro psyche from the beginning.” This, of course, was an indictment of southerners like Flannery O’Connor, who placed Christianity at the center of their worldview, including their view of Jim Crow, which relegated blacks to second-class status. O’Connor reconciled this system with her Catholic faith, but Baldwin suggested that such reconciliations—to be truly legitimate—had to pass African American muster, which O’Connor’s did not.7
Having established the importance of the black perspective, Warren queried Baldwin on black leadership, beginning with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose efforts to build a movement in the North had not succeeded as well as in the South. Rather than address differences in the legal landscape of the North, Baldwin focused on the tight-knit nature of black communities in the South. “Negroes in the South still go to church,” argued Baldwin, “and Negroes in the South—which is much more important—still have something resembling a family around which you can build a great deal. But the Northern Negro family has been fragmented for the last thirty years, if not longer, and once you haven’t got a family then you have another kind of despair, another kind of demoralization, and Martin King can’t reach those people.” It was an intriguing argument, and controversial. Since at least the 1930s, anthropologists and sociologists had debated the relationship between black family life and the existence of a separate black culture in the American South. Most northern-based scholars concluded that disorganization in black family life, including single-parent homes and illegitimacy, were environmental rather than biological in origin, and therefore did not have a direct biological tie to race. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier made this point in 1939 in a book entitled The Negro Family in the United States, which rejected arguments that black family disorganization was a cultural trait unique to African Americans. Yet, Frazier did concede that black family patterns had evolved along particular lines in the American South—largely due to slavery and emancipation—yielding a black “folk culture” that was “recorded and transmitted orally and which was isolated from the influences of modern urban society.” This culture was precisely the same culture that Zora Neale Hurston extolled in her writings, though she focused on music, storytelling, and folklore, not marriage rates. For Frazier, however, black folk culture was also marked by single-parent homes, “‘matriarchal’ family organization,” and “illegitimacy.” However, even Frazier concluded that these were not particularly damaging or pathological because they formed part of a larger, extended kin conception of family. Other scholars, like black sociologist and Harlem Renaissance contributor Charles S. Johnson, concurred, arguing that southern rural blacks had carved out their own “culture” marked by “‘matriarchal’ pattern[s]” and “freer sexual mores.” Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker confirmed this notion, also finding matriarchal family patterns prominent in black communities in the South and concluding that they were not particularly negative or damaging. White sociologist John Dollard joined her, arguing that extended black families in the South provided children with a nurturing environment, even if their parents were not always married.8
Baldwin may have been aware of this work and may have relied on it to argue that black communities in the South were, despite the lynchings and violence of Jim Crow, more cohesive than in the North. Of course, this was something Warren wanted to hear, not least because it resonated with his longstanding argument that black communities had fared better in the segregated South than in the integrated North. Baldwin’s point also resonated with Warren’s interest in the development of a separate black culture in the South, a product of separate black communities.
Warren concluded his interview by asking Baldwin about the state of black leadership, a query that led Baldwin to claim that civil rights organizations were “on their way out” since established leaders like King had failed to connect with black youth. “It has created a tremendous struggle for power,” explained Baldwin, “but that’s not yet such a menace as a split in the leadership—as a real split which is, you know, an open secret.” Baldwin’s concern over the split in black leadership dovetailed with Warren’s own interest in exposing dissension within black America’s civil rights elite, a recurring theme of his book. While willing to acknowledge that African Americans possessed legitimate gripes with whites in the South, Warren was also invested in underscoring the complexity of views within black protest circles, a move that opened the door to nuanced discussions about the implications of reform for black culture, black perspectives, and black identity—topics that King did not broach. Baldwin’s interest in preserving black identity therefore coincided with Warren’s interest in “variety and pluralism,” a phrase he had invoked with Ralph Ellison in Rome several years before. And, Baldwin’s indictment of mainstream, middle-class values, or what he had once termed “a burning house,” appealed to Warren in part because Warren had himself raised questions about mainstream America culture intermittently since the 1920s. Even if Baldwin was not southern-born, in other words, aspects of his thinking made him a fugitive from the modernizing, homogenizing thrust of American middle-class culture. This, perhaps, was the most resonant chord in Warren’s book, a chord that he strummed not just with Baldwin but with a series of black interlocutors, from a variety of occupations and walks of life.9
For example, Warren followed his interview with Baldwin by talking to James Farmer, a civil rights leader based in New York who happened to be the head of CORE, the same group that sponsored the Freedom Rides. Warren met Farmer in his “big, bare shabby” office at 38 Park Row in New York City, across from City Hall, in a Dickensian building replete with “sodden cigarette butts and old gum wrappers on the floor,” a “creaky elevator,” and a “waiting room with bulging and broken cartons stacked in a corner,” the walls covered in a “grime-stained plaster.” Warren’s description of the building shaded the portrait that he painted of Farmer, “comfortable but solid in his ample coffee-colored flesh, not notable for humor, but ready to smile out of his round face.”10
Warren mentioned Farmer’s early activism, which began in the 1940s working for FOR, the same “pacifist organization” that Bayard Rustin belonged to. Farmer then cofounded the Committee for Racial Equality, later renamed the Congress for Racial Equality, in 1942, with the goal of fighting segregation by adopting Gandhian principles of nonviolence. In 1961, Farmer played a critical role in organizing the Freedom Rides, themselves modeled after earlier integrated bus trips sponsored by FOR in the 1940s.11
Warren questioned Farmer about his commitment to integration, wondering “whether the Negro wants real integration, with the shocks and the sharpened competitiveness entailed by that, or a token, a superficial integration, with the insult of formal segregation removed but a self-imposed segregation maintained, blurred around the edges of public contact but hard at center.” Farmer conceded that a “crucial debate” on precisely this point was going on “in the Negro community,” and that “most Negroes—‘the ordinary John Does whose skins are black’—are not concerned with the issue of segregation or of separation versus integration. ‘The real issue for them,’” argued Farmer, “is getting the heel of oppression off their neck.” Personally, Farmer favored integration, but only of a certain kind. Warren asked him, for example, whether integration would “mean the absorption of the Negro into white culture, perhaps even the blood stream,” or “would it mean that the Negro, with ‘pride in culture and history’ and with a sense of ‘identity,’ could enter as a ‘proud and equal partner who has something to give, something to share, and something to receive’?” Farmer favored the latter, arguing for what he called “unity through diversity,” meaning a pluralist society in which groups retained their cultural identities but were not discriminated against because of them. This appealed to Warren, partly because it resonated with his own view that blacks themselves did not particularly want to integrate with whites but rather preferred a voluntary “self-separation characteristic of much minority life in America after ‘success’ and ‘acceptance.’” However, Farmer also cautioned against rigid segregation on account of a “special danger,” namely the encouragement of “nationalistic sentiment and anti-white feelings among Negro children.” Warren seemed to agree with this. At no point did he indicate support for maintaining the laws of segregation outright, preferring to leave open the possibility that individuals and communities might work out their own arrangements. This, of course, led him to confront the single most influential proponent of integration in the South at the time, Martin Luther King, Jr.12
Warren interviewed King on March 18, 1964, in Atlanta at the SCLC headquarters on Auburn Avenue in the heart of the city’s black business district. King struck Warren as a “tidily made, compact man” with “lips rather full but drawn back at the corners under a narrow close-trimmed mustache to emphasize this impression of compactness.” Warren was clearly impressed with King’s resume, noting his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, his leadership of the SCLC, and his recent Nobel Peace Prize, marking the culmination of a decade of high-profile work, not just in Montgomery but also Albany, Birmingham, and other places, including Washington, D.C., where he had delivered an electrifying speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the main theme of which was a “dream” that King had of racial harmony, integration, and equality in the United States.13
Warren began by asking King about his father, a prominent minister in Atlanta who had long worked within the confines of Jim Crow to advance black interests. King explained that his father had waged a struggle for reform long before he had, and that he was simply carrying the torch. Warren found this intriguing and dropped a footnote in his book about how rare it was for black ministers to be interested in politics. “The Negro churches,” explained Warren, “have not traditionally been concerned with the rights of the Negro,” in part because, as an institution, “the Church is a victim of its own heritage—segregation. Its strength came from segregation, and its leaders hardly shared any desire to shift the foundations.” This was an old argument in the South, the same one that whites like Henry Grady had made at the turn of the century. Warren conjured it in passing, fusing legends of the black church with problems King himself had confessed to about rallying the black community. For example, Warren cited in his note a passage in Why We Can’t Wait where King expressed frustration at “the reluctance of many of the Negro clergy of Birmingham to support the demonstration[s] there in 1963,” as well as the uncomfortable fact that “no church was made available for a mass rally” in Montgomery in 1963, “not even the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. King had begun his ministry.” Before King even had a chance to tell his remarkable story, in other words, Warren dropped a subtle grenade fracturing the idea of a unified “movement” in the South by exposing the latent pluralism within the one southern institution most sacred to King, the black church.14
Warren moved on to the ideal of integration, asking King what the next stage of the movement would be after Jim Crow was dismantled. King sounded an assimilationist note, suggesting that individuals strive for “genuine inter-group, inter-personal living.” Skeptical, Warren pressed the minister on whether integration was actually feasible, particularly in places like Washington, D.C., where “some eighty-five per cent of the children in public school” were black. King responded by referencing the need to fix the problem of segregated housing and white flight, perhaps through busing. Warren parried, asking the minister about situations where bus rides for children would simply be too long to be feasible. King conceded, noting that in some cases integration would simply not work. “I agree,” he confessed, “that the problem will not be solved if we have these situations.”15
Once Warren got King to admit that integration might not work in all cases, he then pressed King to reconsider the ramifications of integration generally for black identity. He asked the minister about the “pull, on the one hand, toward Negro tradition, or culture, or blood, and the pull on the other hand toward the white cultural heritage with, perhaps, an eventual absorption of the Negro blood?” This was not one of King’s regular themes, to be sure, but the leader conceded Warren’s point, acknowledging that it was “a real issue,” particularly among the “Negro middle class.” Yet, King maintained that cultural pluralism and civil rights could coincide. “One can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage,” explained King, “African or what have you—and still absorb a great deal of this [mainstream] culture.” Blacks who rejected their culture, argued King, suffered for it. “Often,” black individuals who “reject psychologically anything that reminds [them] of [their] heritage” find themselves “with no cultural roots.”16
Warren beamed. This was a point that he had been trying to make for decades, namely a positive aspect of the South’s separate racial traditions. Now he appeared to have an ally in King, of all people, whose public writings and speeches seemed to stress assimilation, a dreamscape where “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” would attend the same schools, play at the same theme parks, and sit “down together at the table of brotherhood.” Warren’s careful questions teased out a different dream, namely a society in which black and white might sit down together, perhaps at school or work, but then go their separate ways at night. Of course, this was not what Gunnar Myrdal had imagined, since he found black culture to be pathological. But Warren sensed—correctly—that this aspect of Myrdal’s thought was not something even King ascribed to.17
After finding a remarkable commonality with King, Warren turned to a black leader who, initially, seemed more aligned with his thinking: Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm had converted to a black religious sect called the Nation of Islam (NOI) while serving a prison term for burglary, ultimately rising to become one of the Nation’s highest profile officials, which at the time was led by an enigmatic character from Cordele, Georgia, named Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad inspired Malcolm X, convincing him of the church’s central precepts that whites were devils, blacks superior, and integration heresy. Muhammad also sold Malcolm on the Koran, a commitment that culminated in a rift between the two when Malcolm discovered that his leader had fathered several children out of wedlock, a violation of Islamic law so egregious that it prompted him to leave the church. Warren found all this mildly amusing, leading him to introduce his conversation with Malcolm X at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem on June 2, 1964, by portraying the NOI as “doomed” and Malcolm as a quixotic leader “without a real organization,” lodged in a hotel conference room alone, by “himself,” with few prospects.18
Warren’s ensuing conversation took some unexpected turns. As a believer in pluralism, one might have assumed that the Fugitive poet would have found the Nation of Islam to be a kindred faction. However, Malcolm X’s lack of interest in the black experience in the South irked Warren, defying his sense that African Americans had forged something significant under Jim Crow. For example, Warren pressed Malcolm on why, precisely, African Americans joined the Nation of Islam, a point Malcolm responded to by saying that an identity crisis lurked at the core of the African American experience, a sense that “the main problem that Afro-Americans have is a lack of cultural identity,” making it “necessary to teach him that he had some type of identity, culture, civilization before he was brought here.” This was an odd take on black culture, essentially ignoring the black experience in America and focusing exclusively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century civilizations in Africa. Warren, of course, knew something about those civilizations, or at least believed he did, having included extended sections of his novel Band of Angels on the kingdom of Dahomey. However, he seemed to think the black experience in the United States more important than distant memories of Africa, which he found little more than a “dream—sad, angry,” and “vainglorious.”19
Warren also took issue with Malcolm X’s blanket indictments of whites as “devils,” a core NOI position. “Let’s take an extreme case,” posited Warren, “a white child of three or four—an age below decision or responsibility—is facing death before an oncoming truck . . . Is he guiltless?” He wasn’t, responded Malcolm, a view that Warren found unreasonably absolutist, even totalitarian. “Does he mean to imply that moral value equates, simply, with consequence? Many people have believed that. Machiavelli, for one . . . Stalin, for another.” Ultimately, Malcolm X emerged, in Warren’s view, as a menacing, angry demagogue gripped with a searing “illogic,” more polemical than persuasive.20
More sympathetic was Warren’s old acquaintance Ralph Ellison, who Warren interviewed “high above the Hudson River” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, picking up on some of the themes that they had discussed in Rome eight years before. For example, Warren asked Ellison about the “split in the Negro psyche” between a desire to assimilate with whites and a desire to remain apart, to which Ellison responded by invoking the “implicit cultural pluralism of the country,” noting that “the real goal of the pressure now being asserted by Negroes is to achieve on the sociopolitical level something of the same pluralism which exists on the level of culture.” “My problem is not whether I will accept or reject American values,” explained Ellison; “it is rather, how can I get into a position where I can have the maximum influence upon those values.” Ellison’s interest in values suggested that his vision of pluralism was not about exiting America, or even living in a separatist NOI-type enclave, but rather enriching America by recognizing black achievement. “I want to help shape events and our general culture,” confessed Ellison, “not merely as a semi-outsider but as one who is in a position to have a responsible impact upon the American value system.” Warren interpreted Ellison’s comment to mean that there was something that the black writer appreciated about being black, a sense of “enrichment” that went beyond anger and frustration. “Then it’s not merely suffering and deprivation,” queried Warren, “it’s challenge and enrichment?” Ellison concurred, noting that even though some black leaders insisted that segregation constituted “total agony,” the danger in this “lies in overemphasizing the extent to which Negroes are alienated, and in overstressing the extent to which the racial predicament imposes an agony upon the individual.” This was an important statement, one that went directly to Warren’s longstanding sense that Jim Crow had been a livable system. Ellison sharpened his point, however, arguing that much of the movement’s “discipline” came from the black experience with violence in the South, “out of long years of learning how to live under pressure, of learning to deal with provocation and violence.” Warren pivoted, asking Ellison whether he feared losing “Negro identity” under fully integrated conditions. “I don’t fear Negro blood being absorbed,” explained Ellison, “but I am afraid that the Negro American cultural expression might be absorbed and obliterated through lack of appreciation and through commercialization and banalization.” Warren warmed. This was a point he had long made, that mass culture threatened identity and that the South was a holdout against northern influence. Ellison, much like Zora Neale Hurston, found in the South something “present in our lives to sustain us,” a certain “power of character” and “self-control” evident in black cultural expression, including “folklore.”21
Ellison’s view of pluralism paralleled many of Warren’s own views about the South, a sense that the region possessed two cultures, and two peoples, with their own positive traditions. To Ellison’s mind, this was something of value and worth saving. “I watch other people enjoying themselves,” declared Ellison. “I watch their customs, and I think it one of my greatest privileges as an American, as a human being living in this particular time in the world’s history, to be able to project myself into various backgrounds, into various cultural patterns, not because I want to cease being a Negro or because I think that these are automatically better ways of realizing oneself, but because it is one of the great glories of being an American.” “In fact,” continued Ellison, “one of the advantages of being a Negro is that we have always had the freedom to choose or to select and to affirm those traits, those values, those cultural forms, which we have taken from any and everybody . . . We probably have more freedom than anyone; we only need to become more conscious of it and use it to protect ourselves from some of the more tawdry American values. Besides, it’s always a good thing to remember why it was that Br’er Rabbit loved his brier patch, and it wasn’t simply for protection.” Warren rejoiced. He, of course, had used the briar patch to describe segregation three decades earlier. Now he pressed Ellison to explain how racial separation might promote pluralism and growth. “I know some people, Ralph,” stated Warren, “white people and Negroes, who would say that what you are saying is an apology for a segregated society. I know it’s not. How would you answer such a charge?” “I’ve never pretended for one minute that the injustices and limitations of Negro life do not exist,” Ellison responded. “On the other hand I think it important to recognize that Negroes have achieved a very rich humanity despite these restrictive conditions. I wish to be free not to be less Negro American but so that I can make the term mean something even richer.”22
Ellison’s affirmation of pride in his black past, and of the South as a pluralistic region, impressed Warren. “Ellison is more concerned,” he proclaimed, “with the way man confronts his individual doom than with the derivation of that doom; not pathos, but power, in its deepest sense.” Warren then mentioned an essay that Ellison had written challenging Gunnar Myrdal, who, to Ellison’s mind, created “a sensation that [the African American] does not exist in the real world at all—only in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind.” This appealed to Warren. “What Ellison would reject,” he argued, is the violation of the density of life by an easy abstract formulation. Even militancy, if taken merely as a formula, can violate the density of life.” Instead, Ellison embraced the complexity, and tragedy, of American life: “Not only the basic unity, but the rich variety, of life is what concerns him; and this fact is connected with his personal vision of the opportunity in being an American: The diversity of American life is often painful, frequently burdensome and always a source of conflict, but in it lies our fate and our hope.” Here was a position that Warren could embrace, an endorsement of pluralism that took into account the nation’s difficult past without categorically condemning it.23
Warren could have concluded his study with Ellison, for the black writer had confirmed his own beliefs, but Warren went on to add one section dedicated to “the young,” the college-age black students who had been central to much of the grassroots protest in the South. His interviewees included Izell Blair, one of the four black students who had integrated lunch counters in Greensboro, along with three other student activists: Lucy Thornton, Jean Wheeler, and Stokely Carmichael, all of whom he met in a “disheveled,” “none-too-clean basement apartment” at Howard University. The walls were a “calsomined a bilious green,” noted Warren, the air “hot and sticky” from steam pipes in the ceiling. As they sipped “whiskey and water” from “paper cups” and “jelly glasses,” Warren asked Blair about the Greensboro sit-ins four years earlier.24
Blair claimed the idea came from his “roommate,” Joseph McNeil, also a freshman at Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College, or simply A&T. McNeil came up with the idea of a “boycott” that involved sitting at the counter at Woolworth’s until they were served. They contacted a “local merchant” who happened to also be a member of the NAACP, as well as the local NAACP chapter president, George Simpkins, to alert them about the students’ plans. The merchant provided the students with money to purchase items in the store and agreed to notify the press and police. However, Simpkins proved reluctant to involve the NAACP directly, opting instead to call CORE.25
Warren pressed Blair on the originality of the protest, wondering whether they had not modeled their action off earlier events, including student protests in the 1940s. Blair confessed that the 1940s had not been an inspiration but that there had been an earlier student demonstration in Wilmington, North Carolina, “in 1959” that they were aware of. Intrigued by the notion that hidden channels of protest existed between black communities in the South, including channels relaying information and ideas about possible avenues of resistance to whites, Warren invoked his old metaphor for Jim Crow, the briar patch. As he saw it, the nonviolence adopted by the students was less “a way of life” than a tactic, an adaptation of the same strategies of resistance that the “defenseless Br’er Rabbit” had used to “outwit all the powers, thrones, and dominions arrayed against him.” As such, nonviolence joined the “thousand subtle and disguised ways” that African Americans in the South “express[ed] [their] natural resentment,” including “the slovenly broom stroke, the crooked nail, the idiotic ‘yassuh,’ the misplaced tool, [and] the Uncle Remus story.” It was an intriguing comment, evidence that Warren was aware of strategies of black resistance that anthropologists would eventually come to call “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak.” However, his inclusion of nonviolence into this category suggested that black activists were also employing the guise of spirituality to accomplish secular objectives. For many in the movement, he argued, nonviolence provided “a means of evoking and swaying the moral sense of the uncommitted and the moderate in local situations and, through the national press, that of the general public.” Nonviolence, in other words, embodied a particularly savvy form of black resistance, a way to advance black interests by reversing stereotypes, making southern whites look savage and unsympathetic, a point that seemed to resonate with his interlocutors at Howard. “Most segregationists seem to think that Negroes are really nothing but cannibalistic savages,” noted one black student, “and if we start fighting this would give them more reason to believe this.” “Morally it looks better,” argued another, “having a nonviolent protest than it does to be waiting in the woods, with a gun and bombs and things to destroy human life.”26
Reticent through much of the conversation, black activist Stokely Carmichael expressed ambivalence about nonviolence as an ethical ideal, preferring to see in it an expression of black “inner power,” a point that he would refine and rearticulate two years later as “Black Power.” “I never took the approach we’ve got to teach them to love us,” confessed Carmichael. “I thought that was nonsense from the start. But I was impressed by the way they [demonstrators] conducted themselves, the way they sat there and took the punishment.” Warren warmed to Carmichael, questioning him on whether nonviolence may have been an active assertion of black identity, even superiority, over southern whites. “You mean not just by their fortitude,” queried Warren, “but by self-discipline and personal power, inner power?” “Right,” agreed Carmichael, suddenly conceding that nonviolence might simply have been an early iteration of the very spirit of black power that he would later invoke in 1966. No abrupt turn from past practice, in other words, Carmichael’s rejection of nonviolence might simply have been a continuation of his longstanding admiration for black resolve and self-reliance.27
Carmichael’s revelation that nonviolence was simply an incipient iteration of Black Power proved a coup for Warren, enabling him to demonstrate that pluralism reigned even among young black activists, who demonstrated little interest in joining white society or culture. To establish this point, Warren concluded with a “small, delicately formed young woman” named Ruth Turner. As she explained it, even “if all the barriers were lifted, Negroes, after having the experience of equal opportunity, would still choose to live together.” Why, asked Warren, “because there was nothing to prove?” “That’s right,” replied Turner. “The melting pot,” she explained, “has had a pretty homogenous and uninteresting flavor to me. It has become a gray mass of mediocrity, and I reject the melting-pot idea if it means that everybody has to come down to the same standard.” Warren stood vindicated. He had suddenly, unexpectedly, found his own vision of southern society articulated by a student demonstrator. He also found confirmation of the view, best articulated by James Baldwin, that blacks did not want to enter the burning house of white America but rather serve as “the regenerator[s]” of that America, working not “merely for integration into white society but for the redemption of society—a repudiation, and a transcendence, of white values.”28