Interview with UMKC English professor Robert Farnsworth. Farnsworth discusses his family background, his early life in Detroit, attending high school as a white student and athlete in an integrated school in the early 1940s, studying English at the University of Michigan (later getting graduate degrees from the University of Connecticut and Tulane University), developing his sense of politics and racial justice, his involvement with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), his experiences with other activists including A. Cecil Williams, Bruce Watkins and Leon Jordan, and the friction around white participation in CORE. He also discusses shifting away from CORE involvement, the importance of teaching Black literature, covering Black culture in his published work, obtaining the papers of the poet and academic Melvin Tolson, and hosting the 1973 African and Caribbean Writers Conference at UMKC.