William Bedford Clark

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren's informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals—taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers—to report their responses to the Court's decision.

These are poems that range in subject and setting from the profane to the sacred. Rooted in the life and culture of the South and Southwest and employing a variety of forms and voices, they address the mysteries of the past, personal and collective, and survey the possibilities and liabilities of the present. Whether conversational or incantatory, each strives to approximate music, in keeping with the author’s insistence that dancer and dance be one.