A Word on Words: The Best of John Seigenthaler's Interviews

By Pat Toomay, Frye Gaillard, Andrew Maraniss and 22 more

For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most impor­tant writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative pro­cesses. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and Pat Toomay have collected and transcribed some of the iconic interactions from the show.

Featuring interviews with:
Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826505743

Andrew Maraniss

Andrew Maraniss is the New York Times–bestselling author of Strong Inside, the only sports-related book ever to win two prestigious civil rights awards—the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Special Recognition Prize. Andrew is a contributor to ESPN's sports and race website, TheUndefeated.com, and helps run Vanderbilt University's Sports & Society Initiative. He also writes nonfiction for young readers.

Book preview

A Word on Words

A Word on Words

The Best of John Seigenthaler’s Interviews

Edited by

Pat Toomay and Frye Gaillard

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First printing 2023

These interviews originally aired on the Nashville Public Television show A Word on Words and appear here courtesy of Nashville Public Television, Inc. These episodes are available for viewing online at https://www.wnpt.org/a-word-on-words-john-seigenthaler.

Chasing Utopia, Robert Champion, Allowables, The Right Way, The Significance of Poetry, and Still Life with Apron from Chasing Utopia by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright 2013 by Nikki Giovanni. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Good-bye Little Rock and Roller

Words and Music by Marshall Chapman

© 1986 Tall Girl Music (BMI)

All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC.

Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Seigenthaler, John, 1927-2014, author | Toomay, Pat, editor. | Gaillard, Frye, 1946- editor.

Title: A word on words : the best of John Seigenthaler’s interviews / edited by Pat Toomay and Frye Gaillard.

Other titles: Interviews. Selections

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022053765 (print) | LCCN 2022053766 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505736 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826505743 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505750 (adobe pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Authors, American—Interviews. | Seigenthaler, John, 1927–2014—Interviews. | Word on words (Television program) | Television talk shows—United States. | Television scripts. | Interviewing on television.

Classification: LCC PS138 .S45 2023 (print) | LCC PS138 (ebook) | DDC 973.09/9--dc23/eng/20230126

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053765

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053766

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: The Breadth, Depth, and Passion of John Seigenthaler, by Frye Gaillard

I. CIVIL RIGHTS

ARNA BONTEMPS, Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass and Great Slave Narratives

JOHN EGERTON, Speak Now against the Day

JOHN LEWIS, Walking with the Wind

DAVID HALBERSTAM, The Children

FRYE GAILLARD, Cradle of Freedom

II. LITERATURE

JESSE HILL FORD, The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones

PAT CONROY, The Death of Santini

ANN PATCHETT, The Patron Saint of Liars

DORI SANDERS, Clover

ALICE RANDALL, The Wind Done Gone

NIKKI GIOVANNI, Chasing Utopia

III. MUSIC

MARSHALL CHAPMAN, Goodbye Little Rock and Roller

MARTY STUART, Country Music: The Masters

RODNEY CROWELL, Chinaberry Sidewalks

WAYLON JENNINGS, Waylon: An Autobiography

KINKY FRIEDMAN, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover

IV. SPORTS

CHARLES FOUNTAIN, Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice

WILLIAM MARSHALL, Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945–1951

WILLIAM PRICE FOX, Satchel Paige’s America

PAT TOOMAY, On Any Given Sunday

V. THE PRESIDENCY

JON MEACHAM, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Team of Rivals

DAVID MARANISS, Barack Obama: The Story

JOHN SEIGENTHALER Sr., James K. Polk

Epilogue, by Andrew Marannis

Books Featured in This Volume

INTRODUCTION

The Breadth, Depth, and Passion of John Seigenthaler

FRYE GAILLARD

WHEN PAT TOOMAY AND I first started talking about this book, it occurred to us that we were part of a very large group—writers and journalists whose work had been supported by John Seigenthaler. Some members of that group are household names: Jon Meacham, John Lewis, Nikki Giovanni. Others are people like Pat and me. We have worked at the craft, have known sporadic moments of success, but Seigenthaler saw value in what we were doing regardless of the public response.

For more than forty years, beginning in 1971, he hosted a public television show, A Word on Words, in which he interviewed authors about their books. He was never paid for it, and despite the fact that the show aired primarily in Nashville, writers of every level of renown were eager to sit for these conversations. Part of it was simply Seigenthaler’s style.

Being interviewed on TV by John was like a conversation between old friends, remembers Roy Blount, who made multiple appearances on A Word on Words. "We did go back quite a ways, to the early sixties, when he was the new editor of the Tennessean and I was still in college. And he always welcomed me, on air and off, as ‘old friend,’ which was an honor for me to hear. But usually one friend drawing out another on camera entails a shift of gears, which can be awkward. John made it seamless."

The setting itself was relaxed—a studio designed like a living room or den, comfortable chairs, coffee table in between, a bookcase and semi-soft lighting absorbed by mustard-colored walls. It was designed to feel like an intimate space, said producer Jonathan Harwell.

There was one more thing that set these interviews apart and sometimes astonished Seigenthaler’s guests. He read every word of every book. Without fail, remembered his son John Michael, who had a long career in television news. I remember him reading late into the night. He only got three or four hours sleep. He was able to consume these books in a way that he could remember and comprehend. He wrote notes and questions in the front or back, wherever he could find a blank space. He talked constantly about books. Sometimes for the show, he would do five interviews in a day—sometimes two days in a row—particularly during the Southern Festival of Books when a lot of authors came to town. That’s a lot of books to read and comprehend, and he did it with ease. I worked in television for a long time. I knew what it took. Sometimes I would have to just skim a book before an interview, but he never did. When you talked to the authors Dad interviewed, they all said, ‘He read the book!’

Pat Toomay and I remember our amazement at that fact, an astonishment compounded by the fact that we knew what Seigenthaler did for a living. For much of his life, he worked as editor, and then publisher, of the Tennessean, one of the great newspapers in the South. He had made a name for himself as a reporter at that paper. Once, covering the police beat, he rushed to the scene of a potential suicide. It was an October day in 1954, and a fifty-five-year-old man on the edge of a bridge in downtown Nashville was threatening to jump. The muddy brown waters of the Cumberland River swirled just below, as Gene Bradford Williams vowed to take his own life.

Speaking calmly as he approached, Seigenthaler grabbed Williams’s collar just as he leapt from the Shelby Street crossing and pulled him to safety. He never believed in journalistic detachment.

It’s not about objectivity, he told a young reporter. I’ve never met an objective reporter in my life. But if you can be fair and honest, if you can be angry and cry when you see injustice, you can be a reporter for me.

Eight years later, at the age of thirty-four, Seigenthaler became the Tennessean’s editor, stamping it with a passion for advocacy journalism, including relentless coverage of racial injustice, abuses of power, and changes being wrought by the civil rights movement. One of his reporters, John Haile, would remember those days almost as a calling: It was our job to explain the evil of injustice, the harm it causes, what it does to our community—and what you could do to make it right. That was different from a lot of newspapers at the time, and that came from John.

In the course of his work, Seigenthaler became friends with Robert Kennedy and was drawn periodically to the world of politics. In 1961, when Kennedy was chosen by his brother to be attorney general of the United States, Seigenthaler became his administrative assistant. In the spring of that year, RFK sent him on a dangerous mission. On May 4, thirteen freedom riders, six white, seven Black, boarded two buses in Washington, DC, and set off on a journey through the South. This was not an act of civil disobedience. The US Supreme Court had already ordered the desegregation of buses and of the terminals serving interstate travelers. The freedom riders were merely testing the law.

There were only sporadic acts of violence until they reached Alabama. But everything changed when they crossed the state line. Their Greyhound bus was burned in Anniston, where only the intervention of an undercover police officer saved the riders from being killed. The second bus, a Trailways, was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham. There were no police in sight. The beatings were savage, Klansmen using bicycle chains, black jacks, and baseball bats, whatever they thought might do the most harm.

One man made his way to the waiting room still vertical, reported newsman Howard K. Smith, but his head was a red mass of blood. Another was on all fours and could not get up.

On assignment from Robert Kennedy, Seigenthaler flew to Birmingham, where he arrived to find a terrified group. They were huddled in the corner of the airport; traumatized by the fury of the mob, they were trying to board a Delta Airlines flight to New Orleans. Bomb threats had grounded the plane, while another mob gathered outside. Seigenthaler could see that time was running out. I went to see the people at Delta, he remembered, and told them, ‘This is what we want to do. Look through the baggage, make sure there is no bomb, then don’t take any more phone calls until the plane is in the air.’

The airline officials did as he asked. Seigenthaler flew with the riders to New Orleans where they were met by a group of supporters and friends. At last, they were safe. He remembered going to bed that night, thinking to himself, Well done, young man. But at 2 a.m. his telephone rang. It was RFK.

John, he said. This is not over.

As Kennedy explained, another group of riders was about to leave Nashville for Birmingham, and he knew this time somebody could die. He dispatched Seigenthaler to Montgomery to meet in person with Gov. John Patterson, whose antipathy to the freedom riders was clear. We can’t act as nursemaids to agitators, Patterson had announced. You can’t guarantee the safety of a fool. Looking back, Seigenthaler thought the governor may have understood the danger—the fury of the beast, as he later put it—even more clearly than the rest of them did.

Blood will run in the streets, he told Seigenthaler, if the freedom riders continued their protest, or if the Kennedy administration sent in federal troops to protect them.

Blood ran in the streets on Sunday, Seigenthaler replied. Don’t you want to make it Mississippi’s problem?

That was his pitch, the one suggested by Robert Kennedy. Get the riders safely through Alabama and into another state’s jurisdiction. One step at a time.

Patterson reluctantly agreed. His director of public safety, Floyd Mann, widely admired for his professionalism, would oversee security between Birmingham and Montgomery, and from there to the Mississippi line. The Montgomery police would be in charge during a brief stop at the Greyhound terminal.

Seigenthaler had his doubts. He trusted Floyd Mann, but not the police, and sure enough, when he arrived at the station, there was not an officer in sight. Just another mob that seemed, if anything, more savage than the one in Birmingham. When freedom rider Jim Zwerg, who was white, knelt to pray, a Klansmen delivered a kick so vicious that it broke his back. Nearby, attackers knocked William Barbee to the ground, and a white man, standing with a foot on Barbee’s throat, jammed a piece of lead pipe into his ear.

As Seigenthaler rushed to the scene, he saw three freedom riders, two white, one Black, all of them women, being threatened by the mob. One was getting the worst of it, as a white kid, dancing and jabbing like a boxer, was punching at her face, drawing blood every time. Seigenthaler threw open the doors to his car and ordered the women to get in. We might have made it, he remembered, but one of the freedom riders hesitated.

Mister, she said, this is not your fight. I’m nonviolent. I don’t want you to get hurt.

Get your ass in the car, Seigenthaler commanded, and that was when the lights went out. A man behind him hit him across the temple with a pipe. Others began to kick him in the ribs until he passed out underneath his car. On his way to the hospital, he glanced down at a shirt he had borrowed from John Doar, another federal agent. The shirt was soaked in blood. He remembered thinking, Doar is going to be pissed.

Seigenthaler recovered from his injuries, which included broken ribs and a fractured skull, and later whenever he told the story, he was careful to minimize his role. I am only a footnote to history, he said. I shed my blood that day by accident. The real heroes were the young men and women who braved the fury of the mob to confront the evil of segregation.

In 1962, when Seigenthaler left the Justice Department to take over as editor of the Tennessean, he carried with him a deeper, more personal, view of injustice. He could see the same understanding taking root in Robert Kennedy, particularly after 1963 when President John Kennedy was assassinated, and people close to RFK could sense his identification with pain: with the people on the margins of American life, whether they were Native Americans on isolated reservations, African Americans in neglected areas of urban sprawl, or out of work miners in the coalfields of Appalachia.

When Kennedy ran for president in 1968, Seigenthaler helped manage his campaign in the all-important California primary. He thought Kennedy might win the Democratic nomination, and after that, the presidency, and he knew if that happened, he would leave the newspaper once again and go to work on Kennedy’s staff.

Truthfully, I would not have wanted to, he said. But you can’t say no to someone like that.

But late on the night of the California primary, after a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, shots rang out and Robert Kennedy lay in a spreading pool of his own blood. A Mexican busboy cradled his head, trying to keep it off the concrete floor.

Is everybody okay? Kennedy whispered to Juan Romero.

Those, apparently, were his final words, and Seigenthaler felt as if the world had collapsed. He rode with others in the inner circle on the funeral train that carried Kennedy’s body across the country, and he served as a pallbearer at the funeral. The following November, not long after the presidential election, I went to see Seigenthaler at his office. We talked for a while about all that had happened—about the sense of loss and the looming presidency of Richard Nixon.

The country deserves Nixon, Seigenthaler declared. It really deserves Wallace, but it got Nixon.

It was, I thought, a moment of icy bitterness that was not at all in character; nor did it last. Seigenthaler threw himself into the world of journalism, perhaps more fully than he ever had. It was, he said, the most important thing I could have done with my life. During these days at the Tennessean, his reporters embarked on bold assignments. Jerry Thompson infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. Frank Sutherland went undercover to expose filthy conditions at Central State psychiatric hospital. Ken Jost spent five days as a prisoner at the Davidson County workhouse. Seigenthaler led the investigations personally, pushing the reporters to dig even deeper.

In 1982, he became founding editor of the editorial page at USA Today, a new national newspaper based in Washington, DC. For a decade, he held that job while serving as publisher of the Tennessean. He flew from Nashville to Washington every week, and as the Tennessean later wrote, Somehow, he made it all work.

In 1991, he retired. But almost immediately he founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Working with others on the staff, he put together programs, part study, part celebration, of what he thought was the cornerstone of American democracy. He traveled often, made frequent speeches about the First Amendment, served on the Neiman Advisory Board at Harvard, and worked with the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence at Middle Tennessee State University.

John did what John wanted to do, remembered his administrative assistant, Gay Campbell, what he felt called to do. Most mornings at the First Amendment Center, he came in late, always to streams of appointments. You never knew when a Kennedy would call. Ethel Kennedy was often in touch. John could be a man of many words or a man of few words. His mind was just amazing. If a student came by, he loved that. He enjoyed mentoring. That was what he liked better than anything.

As young writers, Pat Toomay and I each came to know that side of Seigenthaler. Pat, for example, played football for Vanderbilt, graduating in 1970 after being part of Vanderbilt’s only winning season in the 1960s, and the following year, playing on a team that beat Alabama. He was drafted as a project by the Dallas Cowboys, and in an effort to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance of that experience (including the piety of his coach, Tom Landry), he began making notes. By the end of his first season, he had thirty or forty pages. He sent them to John Bibb, a sports columnist he knew at the Tennessean, who passed them along to Seigenthaler.

Seigenthaler sent them to his friend, Evan Thomas, editor at W. W. Norton in New York, who in turn passed them on to one of the young editors on his staff. Pat knew nothing about any of this until a letter arrived from Norton, asking if there was more. No, he replied, but there could be. He continued taking notes, which resulted in a book, The Crunch. Later, in 1984, Pat published a novel, On Any Given Sunday, which became a Hollywood movie. Seigenthaler not only wrote a blurb for that book, but he invited Pat to be a guest on A Word on Words.

If John Seigenthaler had not done what he did, I would never have considered writing seriously, says Toomay.

My own experience was similar. Seigenthaler and I became friends in 1968, when I was part of a student group that brought Robert Kennedy to Vanderbilt. Seigenthaler saw to it that I was part of the welcoming committee that met RFK at the airport. He gave me his seat in the car that drove Kennedy to Vanderbilt—and there we were in the back seat, me, Kennedy, and the astronaut John Glenn. Fifteen years later, I made the first of three appearances on A Word on Words. On each occasion, John introduced me as an old friend.

He had many friends, of course. Like Pat, I was a bit player in that pantheon. But maybe not in Seigenthaler’s mind. Though he traveled comfortably in the corridors of fame, I don’t believe he was driven by that. I’m certain, for example, that he saw the talent of Pat Toomay and jumped at the chance to nudge it along. Part of it was simply his generous, if unsentimental, nature. But John was also a lover of the craft—of journalism, of writing, of people who care about justice and truth.

Jonathan Harwell, one of his producers for A Word on Words, remembered a day when he and John taped thirteen shows back-to-back. Seigenthaler had read every word of every book. The tapings were sometimes like that, often during the Southern Festival of Books, Nashville’s literary celebration held in the fall, which reliably brought great authors to the city. Seigenthaler was a major supporter of the festival and used that occasion to record as many interviews as he could. Other writers on national book tours, whenever they occurred, were eager to pause for A Word on Words. Some traveled to Nashville just for that purpose.

[Novelists] Jane Smiley and Lee Smith both fit that description, said Harwell. They were friends of John and knew his show. Nashville was also blessed to have a community of interesting writers to choose from—Ann Patchett, Peter Guralnick, Al Gore, Marty Stuart, Marshall Chapman, and Morgan Entrekin being just a few. We found guests wherever we could.

The interviews collected in this volume represent some, but certainly not all, of Seigenthaler’s best. They are intended more as a cross section—conversations with icons like John Lewis, David Halberstam, Waylon Jennings, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but with some of the rest of us too. The interviews have been reproduced in their entirety and faithfully transcribed for inclusion in this book. The date for each interview, when it is available, has been provided at the beginning of each section, so the reader can best interpret the historical setting for the remarks as they are shown. These interviews and many others can be viewed on the website of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/a-word-on-words.

Pat and I have put it together with a feeling of gratitude. Most of the time, with mentors of extraordinary generosity, the best you can do is pay it forward. This is our chance to pay it back—to celebrate the legacy of a remarkable man and his gift to the writers of his time. We make no claim to objectivity, a quality he regarded as vastly overrated. We are simply in awe of his extraordinary life.

PART I

CIVIL RIGHTS

JOHN SEIGENTHALER WAS A young reporter in Nashville when the civil rights movement began in that city. Partly because of that, and partly because of his experience with the movement as a member of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, Black struggles for equality became a recurring theme on A Word on Words.

These five interviews are grouped chronologically according to the subjects they cover. We begin with Arna Bontemps, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most prolific African American scholars of the twentieth century. At the time of his interview with Seigenthaler, Bontemps was head librarian at Fisk University and had released two books that year: Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass and Great Slave Narratives.

John Egerton, a renowned journalist/historian living in Nashville, won the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for his book Speak Now against the Day, telling the story of a generation of Southerners who worked for racial progress before the beginning of the civil rights movement. As Egerton explains, these were men and women, Black and white, who looked at the racial order in the South and said, This won’t work.

One of Seigenthaler’s most iconic guests on A Word on Words was John Lewis, who emerged from his leadership role in the civil rights struggle to become one of the most beloved members of the US Congress. He talks about his memoir, Walking with the Wind, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award.

Pulitzer Prize–winner David Halberstam was a twenty-five-year-old reporter in Nashville—a friend and contemporary colleague of Seigenthaler’s—covering the civil rights movement for the Tennessean when he came to understand that he was writing about history. In his book The Children, he writes about John Lewis, James Lawson, Diane Nash, and other iconic figures he met in those years.

Frye Gaillard also won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America. Gaillard was one of a number of emerging writers in whose work Seigenthaler took an interest. Such writers were frequent guests on A Word on Words.

ARNA BONTEMPS

Free at Last: The Biography of Frederick Douglass and Great Slave Narratives

BROADCAST DATE: JANUARY 6, 1972

SEIGENTHALER: Good evening. Welcome to A Word on Words. Our guest tonight is Arna Bontemps, one of the distinguished men of American literature, who, during a long and notable career, has published some thirty works—biographies, anthologies, fiction, and nonfiction. His most recent books, which came out in 1971, are Free at Last: The Life of Fredrick Douglass, the slave who broke the bonds and went north to join Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison in the abolitionist movement. And Great Slave Narratives, a collection of three first-person accounts written by three people who experienced the bonds of slavery themselves, with an introduction by our guest. Dr. Bontemps, am I correct in assuming that the first-person slave narratives are really the beginnings of Black literature in America?

[Bontemps pauses before answering.]

BONTEMPS: Well, almost. I had to take a moment to decide whether they were before the poetry. Perhaps if you were to narrow it down to a date. Poetry was written before there was a book. Before there was a narrative. But on the whole, the narratives were the first literature in America by Blacks that had a real impact on American culture.

SEIGENTHALER: In Great Slave Narratives, you selected three, which are actually the stories of four people, since one of the narratives is by a husband and wife. As I go over these narratives, the remarkable thing to me is the ability of these people caught in the trap of slavery to be able to articulate their experiences. I take it that they are poorly educated. How do you explain their ability to describe in such graphic detail what their circumstances were?

BONTEMPS: Well, I think that the intellectual capacity of the slave is generally underestimated. Being a slave didn’t really change the capacity of the human being to reflect and reach some conclusions about his condition. The fact that many of them were not literate didn’t mean that they didn’t have the capacity for literature. In their background, you may remember, in Africa, they had an oral tradition that went back a very long time. And as the missionaries who first went to Africa found out, much of that literature, which was in the form of proverbs and stories, had been preserved without books. Books—with all apologies and due respect for the nature of this program—the world has been able to get along without books at certain periods. And in Africa, there were long periods when there were no books available. But literature survived somehow, along with the basic impulse toward self-expression, so that the slave had a built-in subject matter. He had a great story—a great experience—to tell.

SEIGENTHALER: I guess of all the slaves who had the ability to articulate that experience, Frederick Douglass does stand out as the most demonstrative example.

BONTEMPS: Right. He really reached classic proportions, I would say.

SEIGENTHALER: Well, I’m fascinated by your Life of Douglass. It’s a fast-moving book, taking him from one experience to another. I’ve always thought of Frederick Douglass as a man who, once he broke the bonds of slavery and became involved as a public person, was constantly speaking and writing about the condition of slavery. In a sense, I’ve always thought of him as being personally liberated from those torturous experiences. But as I read your Free at Last, it occurs to me that he continued to endure conflict, pain, and torture throughout his life. I wonder. Was he ever really free?

BONTEMPS: Well, as I say in the biography, he was free after his death. But up until then, no. One of the things that most motivated him was the conviction that until slavery was abolished, the so-called free Blacks were themselves in slavery. And I think that if I were to put in a nutshell his greatest achievement, it was that he was able to convince the majority of free Blacks that their only hope of complete freedom—of emancipation—was the elimination of slavery as an institution in the United States. We can follow that through the hundred conventions of the abolitionists, which I’ve described in the book. And actually, we can document the fact that while at first the free Blacks, of which there were a good many in the United States, going back to the Revolutionary War, when a good many were freed, while others had become emancipated in other ways—we can document their progress from an attitude in which they thought if they had anything to do with slavery—if they talked about it, if they tried to work against it—they would endanger their own situations.

SEIGENTHALER: In your discussion of his own development as a free personality, you never say this about Douglass, but I come to a point where it seems to me that after he was involved in the abolitionist movement—after he was associated with Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips—there came a time when he wanted to demonstrate in a more graphic way that he was, in a sense, his own man. And he broke with them, really, over the starting of his own newspaper, the North Star. But that’s just another point of conflict in his life, it seems.

BONTEMPS: Yes, that’s right. At first freedom was the most it. It was the consuming, overall issue. And by freedom, I mean emancipation. While the campaign was still going on, it began to develop that this was not the end. That after breaking the legal barrier, there was a good bit of freedom still to be won. And he’d begun to move toward that before emancipation. And I think this is explained by his later association with Gerrit Smith, as against Garrison, because he was convinced that political action—

SEIGENTHALER: Was vital. And that association with Gerrit Smith sort of led him into an association with John Brown. He seemed to flirt with John Brown and the whole concept that Brown was thinking of pursuing—the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. But then, when it came time to make the determination about joining Brown, even though Brown had been with Douglass in his home, there came a time when Douglass was just absolutely repelled by the idea. Brown was going to raid Harper’s Ferry with only a handful of people. I guess Douglass thought Brown’s scheme was insane.

BONTEMPS: He decided that what Brown was contemplating was suicide. And that what he could contribute was to not make himself a sacrificial lamb. John Brown told him that he couldn’t promise success, but he could promise immortality. And Douglass said that didn’t suit him. His response was that while Brown could die for the slave, he could only live for the slave.

SEIGENTHALER: That’s right. And I know that when Douglass finally got his papers—you tell how there was a split in the abolitionist movement about whether Douglass should use those papers to demonstrate that he was a free man. That it was a concession, in a sense. But it was something Douglass could hang on to, so he kept his papers, and insisted on going ahead.

BONTEMPS: That’s right. You see Garrison had become so hung up on the idea that slavery should not be recognized, that taking this step to free himself was somehow a surrender to the philosophy that the constitution was not binding in the case of the slave issue.

SEIGENTHALER: If you take Douglass as the first of three books that you’re going to write, the three being the life of Douglass, the life of Booker T. Washington, and the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, you cover really a period of 150 years of American history through three quite different personalities. And I guess they represent a sort of transition in Black thought, as it related to the oppressive nature of the American condition in so far as the Black man was concerned. Now, the book on Booker T. Washington will come out this year. And then you’re also working on a book called The Harlem Renaissance Remembered.

BONTEMPS: That’s right.

SEIGENTHALER: I’d like to talk to you a little bit about that, because it seems to me that you’re really the only living, working artist from that period, which was the twenties there in Harlem, with Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Could you tell us a little bit about The Harlem Renaissance Remembered? What it’s gonna be?

BONTEMPS: Well, actually, it’s a collection of essays, all of them written by students of mine, either at Yale, or at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois. Or by a few others. One is by a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt. A couple of others are by post-doctoral people who are teaching, one at Louisiana State and the other at the University of Wyoming. All of whom interviewed me in depth. They also all used the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke library at Yale.

SEIGENTHALER: Which you curated.

BONTEMPS: I was curator of that collection, yes. So, I was involved in the writing of all of these students, indirectly if not directly.

SEIGENTHALER: And this collection really represents, to my way of thinking, the best example of the explosion of interest in Black literature that’s developed over the past few years. I suspect there’s going to be great interest in your Harlem Renaissance book. The early twenties must have been an exciting time with all of those talented intellectuals engaging in crosscurrents of discussion about where the movement was going.

BONTEMPS: Yes, that, as well as the discussions of how the Negro should be presented in art and in literature. Because all of the intellectuals were very alert to the image of the Negro that had been projected in American art and films, in plays and in books. And they were quick to take sides and to express opinions. And while all of that was being thrashed out, this band of very young writers, represented by those you’ve mentioned—Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, who were all doing their own thing, so to speak, absorbing the attitudes. Of course, this was also the period when Marcus Garvey was challenging the role of the NAACP as the intellectual leader of the Black masses.

SEIGENTHALER: And Garvey’s really thinking to move the whole thing toward separatism. And when that movement was at its height, the Depression hit.

BONTEMPS: I would say it reached a high point in ’28 and ’29. The Depression hit in the latter part of ’29, but of course the Depression in Harlem wasn’t felt immediately, because nobody there owned much of any stocks. So they weren’t jumping out of any windows. But gradually, it began to reach them, and by 1931, we had something like a dispersal.

SEIGENTHALER: Yes, all of you who were involved in it went your separate ways, and you wound up in a small school in Alabama. And that was the time of the Scottsboro case.

BONTEMPS: Yes, I reached Alabama just in time to observe that close up.

SEIGENTHALER: You were actually there, and you participated in it as an observer.

BONTEMPS: I was an observer. A number of the people who went down, visiting jails and so forth, came to visit us en route. Because I was in Huntsville and the boys were in prison down in Montgomery, and of course the trial was in Decatur.

SEIGENTHALER: Langston Hughes came through—

BONTEMPS: Langston Hughes came through and stayed with us for a few days.

SEIGENTHALER: Did that create any difficulties? Even then he was a controversial figure.

BONTEMPS: It did. It put me in a very delicate position.

SEIGENTHALER: In what way?

BONTEMPS: Well, the people who employed me in the little school thought that Langston Hughes was really the incarnation of evil.

SEIGENTHALER: And that created problems for you.

BONTEMPS: It did, and led eventually to my leaving.

SEIGENTHALER: Was leaving part of an ultimatum?

BONTEMPS: Not immediately. I was given a list of things that I would have to do. Of course, I couldn’t yield to it, because what they wanted was absurd.

SEIGENTHALER: What sort of things?

BONTEMPS: Burn up my books. Burn up all my books about the Harlem Renaissance.

SEIGENTHALER: Did they really suggest that was something you had to do?

BONTEMPS: Not only suggested but required it.

SEIGENTHALER: So you left.

BONTEMPS: I did.

SEIGENTHALER: And then, later, you were involved in the writer’s project that was part of the federal government’s effort to cure the hardest punishment from the Depression.

BONTEMPS: That’s right. I took a year off after I left Alabama, and I wrote Black Thunder. Black Thunder was favorably received critically, although books were not selling at that time, and mine certainly didn’t sell, because it had the same publisher and was on the same list as Gone with the Wind. So naturally my book wasn’t seen. But one of the people who read it was John T. Frederick, who, I believe, is still living, and who at that time was a professor at Northwestern, and later at Notre Dame. He read it and offered to make me one of his supervisors on the Illinois Writers’ Project.

SEIGENTHALER: In that project, there were people like Frank Yerby, Richard Wright—

BONTEMPS: Margaret Walker—

SEIGENTHALER: And they all had their own literary programs they were pursuing. Each person had a different project—

BONTEMPS: Well, some of these people were just writers. I was a supervisor. Jack Conroy was a supervisor. Nelson Algren was a supervisor. There were still others. James Phelan. I saw him on television recently—

SEIGENTHALER: As a result of the writer’s project, you collaborated with Jack Conroy on a book that dealt with migrants. Is that right?

BONTEMPS: Migrants, yes. Jack Conroy had already been interested in migrations toward the industrial centers. And he had a Guggenheim Fellowship to do them. I was also interested in migrations, but with special reference to Black migration from the South. We sort of pooled our efforts and did a book we called They Seek a City, which was updated and later republished as Anyplace but Here.

SEIGENTHALER: That updating was in 1970?

BONTEMPS: That’s right.

SEIGENTHALER: That whole time was a desperate one, I guess, for people who were involved in writing and seeking to make their contribution to society through writing. But out of that, in the days that followed, came some great contributions to letters.

BONTEMPS: I would say so. Certainly, we know what Richard Wright’s future was, and Frank Yerby’s—and Katherine Dunham’s, too, by the way. Toward the end of that period, theater projects got absorbed into the writers’ projects, because they didn’t abolish them all at the same time. So, some theater projects were brought in.

SEIGENTHALER: I know that your career has covered so many different interests, and facets in the field of writing. Two that stand out in my mind is the work you did with Countee Cullen that later became the musical St. Louis Woman. And I guess Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen were involved with the music in that. They wrote Come Rain or Come Shine, but initially that project was a drama