Vanderbilt University has made available a new digital archive of recordings made by Robert Penn Warren while conducting research for his 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro (Random House). The original recordings, made on reel-to-reel tape, include interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Septima Clark, and other leaders of the civil rights movement. Many of the interviews included on the tapes were not used in the book.
The original tapes are held in the archives of the University of Kentucky and Yale University, but scholars at Vanderbilt have digitized the recordings and made them available along with 4,000 pages of searchable transcripts of the contents. This allows researchers to easily locate discussions of particular events or issues.
The archive can be accessed here.
