Essay Assignment

Directions: Papers should be 2-4 pages, double-spaced. The paper needs to be turned into dropbox on Elearn by 12 PM on Tuesday December 5.

In this assignment, you are to listen to one of the many audiotaped interviews that are archived on the website Who Speaks for the Negro?: An Archival Collection (whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu). The website has plenty of explanation, so you can learn more about the website through its own resources, but the website is dedicated to making available numerous interviews performed by Robert Penn Warren (a famous American author) during the Civil Rights era. The many interviews of major figures from the Civil Rights movement (which includes famous individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as well as lesser known figures, for instance, like a group of college students from Tougaloo College) are all very interesting as well as representative of many different experiences and perspectives.

For the paper, your assignment is to choose one of these interviews (they vary in length, but most are around an hour) and detail what is said and what are the key issues at hand. Your paper then needs to have two parts:

Part I: A detailed summary of the interview. This should be detailed and specific. The goal of this section is to describe the interview in enough detail so that a person who has not listened to the interview can potentially gain a clear idea of what happened in the interview from your summary alone.

Part II: For Part II, you need to make a connection between what was said in the interview that you chose and what we have talked about in class. This also needs to be as specific as possible.