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For years, trying to hear a set of historic interviews with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X involved trips to academic libraries in multiple states–and the ability to operate a reel-to-reel machine. Now, those hours of taped conversations and their transcripts are available to everyone on the website of Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center. What’s more, the newly accessible recordings offer a glimpse of a churning movement in transition.

The conversations were edited and compiled to become Warren’s 1965 book, “Who Speaks for the Negro?”

It was 1964 when Pulitzer-prize winner Robert Penn Warren set out to take the pulse of the civil rights movement.

At that point Martin Luther King’s voice had already echoed out from the Lincoln Monument. It was the year the poll tax was abolished, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

But for every victorious moment, there had been a deadly one: Medgar Evers shot by a sniper, four little girls killed in a church bombing, three civil rights workers found dead in Mississippi.

CHANGE IN EVERY CORNER

Warren had defended segregation back during his days as one of the Southern Agrarians, a writers group formed with some of his Vanderbilt classmates. But by the time he lugged his bulky recording equipment around from state to state, meeting with civil right leaders wherever he could he was a high profile proponent of integration.

Robert Penn Warren was a white southerner who’d changed. And part of what he found was a hint that change was coming for the civil rights movement, too.

Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael was in his early twenties when he spoke to Warren. He’d already been jailed as a Freedom Rider, and was a leader in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC [snick]. The tape captures Carmichael at a moment when he was starting to challenge the standard message of the movement.

Carmichael refers to a speech he’d given at Howard University in which he made a point of saying that not all black people love all white people. He explains it was meant as a counterpoint to what he knew others would be saying at the same event, that nonviolence is the way. “I think the issue of nonviolence is very important in the question of solving certain things,” Carmichael clarified, “it’s not true that it’s gonna bring us closer together and make us love each other.”

Carmichael still felt peaceful protest was important in solving “certain things,” but Warren’s conversation with Malcom X quickly showed the black muslim leader had little patience for that approach.

“Any time you tell a man to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent in the face of a violent enemy, you’re making that man defenseless,” said X. “You’re robbing him of his God-given right to defend himself.”

X stopped short of calling out Martin Luther King, Jr. as a “Uncle Tom” in his interview, although he’d done so in public before. The accusation that King was a sort of traitor came up late in Warren’s conversation with a weary-sounding King.

He said not everyone understood that nonviolence isn’t a choice to be weak but, in his words, “a very strong force where you stand up with all your might against an evil system.”

NORTH VERSUS SOUTH

But listening to several other conversations, it becomes clear King was up against regional differences, too.

Ruth Turner

Talking to Ruth Turner, an organizer for the Congress On Racial Equality in Cleveland, Ohio, Warren asked if she thought King’s influence in the North was waning. Her answer? “I do.”

Turner felt that King didn’t really know how to address the problems faced in an already integrated North. Like, how do you make sure not just that schools aren’t all-black or all-white, but that African-American children finish with a quality education.

She also took issue with what she called his “personality makeup,” saying “I don’t think he’s a politician, nor do I think he thinks like one. I think you have to, because we are playing, in a sense, a game of power.”

A HARDER EDGE

A few years later, Ruth Turner became one of the architects of the Black Power movement, named for a rallying cry issued by Stokely Carmichael as he and others became increasingly militant.

Black Nationalism, Black Power, Black Panthers—that harder edge wouldn’t truly form for another couple of years, but its seeds are right there in the tapes of Robert Penn Warren’s interviews.