1965 and the Battle Over Who Spoke for the Negro

Abstract

Up to this point I have argued that Ellison’s “Negro” is his poetic and literary reaction to the Cold War that cannot be simply reduced to an allegory about racial identity politics. Starting with this chapter I follow Ellison’s “Negro” into the shifting political and intellectual atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s. With the exposure of the CCF in 1967 the “official” cultural Cold War is coming to the end. By 1965 domestic and international political movements like Black Power, Liberation Theology and non-aligned movements provide a global counterweight to American Cold War liberal hegemony. In the arts, the Black Arts movement in the USA, the Latin American Boom and the Situationists contested the way this liberalism informed people’s understanding of literary as well as performative history and tradition. It is within this historical context that Robert Penn Warren’s innovative, landmark series of interviews Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) was published. Despite the interrogative nature of his title, in many ways Warren’s book is a statement about who should speak for the Negro, and how. Perhaps it is no surprise that Ralph Ellison appears in Who Speaks for the Negro?; his interview — one of the longest in the book — occupies a central place in Warren’s work. A significant part of Ellison’s interview with Warren is dedicated to a discussion about the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” which was published in Dissent in 1958.