The Question Is Not Answered

Who Speaks for the Negro?
by Robert Penn Warren
Random House, 1965, 454 pp., $5.95

Robert Penn Warren, ex-Southerner, novelist, literary critic, and one-time apologist for segregation writes here about the civil rights movement. Such a combination of author and subject should, one imagines, produce a perceptive and exciting volume. But it doesn’t.

One’s reaction to this book will depend u...