Praise for Free All Along:
Featured in the New Yorker's Page-Turner
One of Mashable's 17 books every activist should read in 2019
The conversations feel immediate and are thoroughly engaging, and it seems as though this was organically the case; when Warren interviewed Malcolm X, he was in such high demand that he committed to only 15 minutes for the interview, but ended up staying for over an hour. Free All Along is the book Warren should have published: It's a product of careful listening to people more than qualified to speak for themselves.
-The Progresive Populist
Warren is a skilled interviewer, the responses are beautifully complex. . . . [This is] a fascinating and valuable document of the 1960s.
-Publisher Weekly
An anthology that arguably holds more contemporary importance as an historical document than the original release.
-Kirkus Reviews
A lively, conversational transcription, one that faithfully recreates the energy in the room as Warren questions influential writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, yields to Martin Luther King Jr.'s loquacious speaking style, and prods Malcolm X on the role of Elijah Muhammad in shaping his views.
-Booklist
This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along.
-Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren
There are times when voices from the past speak directly to our present. Free All Along is a rare and electrifying document, one that reveals the enduring connections between the long struggle for civil rights in the last century to the fight for justice in our own.
-Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of What Truth Sounds Like
Praise for Say It Plain:
The speeches...collectively provide a sweeping perspective on evolving issues of black identity in the struggle for equality.
-Booklist
The electrifying speeches-all recorded at live events-focus directly on the questions, the struggles, the defeats and the triumphs of the 1960s to present-day America. A new depth to oral and written history, readers and listeners should consider this a great resource to add to their own personal collection.
-The Saginaw News
