Reading Warren alongside other midcentury works by Maya Angelou, Richard Wright and Marshall Frady, who profiled George Wallace, is to see anew the truth that Appomattox was as much a beginning as it was an end.
Warren, who had written sympathetically of segregation in a 1930 essay he later repudiated, sought out the voices of African-Americans and Ku Klux Klansmen, of ministers and teachers, businessmen and professors, farmers and lawyers. The result of Warren’s journey was his 1956 book “Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South,” a reportorial portrait of the emotions of a moment not unlike our own - as painful as that is to note.
Enraged white Southerners were flying the Confederate battle flag and carrying signs that read “Keep Our Schools White.” A Southern-born friend of Warren’s in New York told him: “I’m glad it’s you going, and not me.” Bearing witness, seeking to understand, confronting past and present in their complexity and pain: It was all part of what Robert Penn Warren had called “the awful responsibility of Time” in his 1946 novel “ All the King’s Men.” In the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s school-integration decisions in the mid-1950s, Warren - novelist, poet, critic, professor - accepted an assignment from Life magazine to return to his native South from Connecticut, where he lived and taught at Yale, to explore the current state of the world of his childhood and youth. He didn’t really want to go back, but he knew he had to.
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