Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America

Epilogue

EPILOGUE After Ellison,Toward Obama My problem is not whether I will accept or reject American values. It is, rather, how I can get into a position where I can have the maximum influence on those values. Ralph Ellison I personally think in the post–Civil Rights period a black person is wasting his (or her) time, the preciously few years of their lives, by devoting their energy—as a “spokesman”—to explaining so-called “black”things to white people.Whites can—and should—do their own homework. Charles S. Johnson Ellison saw almost as soon as his novel was published that the second half of his life would allow him opportunities unimaginable during its first half. His 1950s letters to Murray express a cautious confidence about the possibilities opening up to a pair of talented “moses” such as Ellison and Murray. His optimism can be attributed in part to the startling and immediate success of Invisible Man and in part to the social revolution occurring beyond the confines of his study. They seemed to be related phenomena. With awe and admiration he watched the Montgomery bus boycott and Autherine Lucy’s attempt to integrate the University of Alabama. “I feel a lot better about our struggle,” he tells Murray from Rome in 1956, because “mose is still boycotting the hell out of Montgomery and still knocking on the door of Alabama U” (Trading 116). Two years later Ellison is ready to forget Jim Crow altogether, telling Murray that whenever he sees blacks settling for less than they can receive “it makes you want to kick their behinds and then go after Roy Wilkins and that crowd that don’t see that Civil rights are only the beginning” (196). Once the legal victories were won, however, Ellison’s position did not always differ from that of Roy Wilkins. Wilkins criticized King’s stance against the Vietnam War, probably for the same reason that Ellison never publicly opposed it: both wanted to be loyal to Lyndon Johnson, the white 216 After Ellison, Toward Obama 217 Southerner without whose help neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Voting Rights Act would have been passed when it was.Ellison was concerned that King’s Vietnam protest would cause the Civil Rights movement to lose its momentum. In the 1930s and ’40s Ellison had aligned himself with the Communists because they seemed committed to advancing blacks’ interest in American society. In the 1960s he aligned himself with Johnson for the same reason. Shrewd like his famous narrator’s grandfather, he recognized that political realities shift and that therefore so must the tactics of minority groups looking to increase their holdings in the American game. Roosevelt had declined to integrate the armed forces; Johnson integrated the Supreme Court with the lawyer who had helped to win Brown. Once the Jim Crow cover was blown off the lid of American possibility,new opportunities came rushing out,and the strategy for advancing blacks’interests changed as well. As Danielle Allen has argued, the changed status of blacks in American society required a new form of citizenship in which blacks would no longer be required to sacrifice themselves for the social cohesion of others (whites). This radical realignment of social roles meant that blacks and whites would see each other—and themselves—differently. Ellison bravely met a society in which the social and political assumptions of the first half of his life were obliterated by his occupying a position where he could speak for all Americans as well as black Americans.Of course,allowing blacks to occupy places that they had not “officially”been allowed to inhabit—whether seats in white restrooms or in white boardrooms—did not mean that historical conditions of poverty and social neglect would be addressed effectively or soon. Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to make good the promises of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but the American political system recoiled at this gesture—as it had recoiled at giving forty acres and a mule to freed slaves—and systematically worked to displace it.The revolt against Johnson’s programs was carried through over a thirty-year period in the elections of Nixon, Reagan, and, finally, Bill Clinton, whose administration effectively ended the welfare program for the poor that Johnson had tried to establish. Along with the reaction against Johnson’s poverty programs came also a revolt against Brown. The Warren Court, which had unanimously passed Brown—with the...