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Robert L. Allen is an award-winning journalist, author, editor, and professor of African-American Studies. Born in 1942, Allen grew up in segregated Atlanta where he experienced firsthand both the harsh realities of racism and the growth of the Civil Rights Movement within the Black community. Upon his graduation from Morehouse College, he moved to New York City and began a career in journalism as the first Black reporter for the National Guardian. He became a leading voice in documenting the intersection of the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements during the 1960s, and even helped create the anti-draft group African Americans for Survival after he formally refused his own draft notice in 1967. That same year, his reporting for the National Guardian took him to the International Peace Conference in Czechoslovakia as well as a tour of North and South Vietnam. Allen moved to San Francisco in 1968, where he earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and transitioned from a career in journalism to one of scholarship focused on the African American experience. He served as senior editor of The Black Scholar from 1975 to 2012, a publication long-considered one of the most influential journals of Black Studies, and held professorships at San Jose State, Mills College, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, most notably The Port Chicago Munity (1989), which played a significant role in the creation of the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. In this oral history, Allen discusses growing up in segregated Atlanta; the impact of the Emmett Till murder; the rise of the Civil Rights Movement; Harlem and the Black community in New York during the 1960s; traveling to Vietnam in 1967; activism in California’s Bay Area; editorship of The Black Scholar; academic career in African American Studies; the Port of Chicago book and memorial; as well as his other books and writing projects.

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