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1 INTRODUCTION Ellison Reconstituted Beyond Invisible Man Now mind! I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dear Irving, I am still yakking on and there’s many a thousand gone, but I assure you that no Negroes are beating down my door, putting pressure on me to join the Negro Freedom Movement,for the simple reason that they realize I am enlisted for the duration. I wish that we would dispense with this idea that we [Negroes] are begging to get in somewhere. The main stream is in oneself. The main stream of American literature is in me, even though I am a Negro, because I possess more of Mark Twain than many white writers do. Ralph Ellison In 1903, in the pitch dark of the nearly one-hundred-year-long Jim Crow night, W. E. B. Du Bois defined the status of black Americans through the ironic inflection of a too familiar question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (3). In 1952 Ralph Ellison gave perhaps the definitive answer to Du Bois’s question with his classic novel, Invisible Man. Along with articulating the many complex ways in which it was problematic to have been born black in America, Ellison insisted that the implied premise of Du Bois’s question addressed all Americans, not just black ones. In other words, the “problem” of being black in America was not peculiar to black Americans but was shared by every American.For blacks,the “Negro problem ” meant that they were denied their proper status as equal citizens; for whites, the problem was more complex in that it meant that their identities depended on either their explicit or their tacit consent in the daily subjugation of others. Invisible Man indicated that the “Negro problem” was a collective one that could be solved only by means of a heroic national action: one that confirmed that America was committed to democracy in practice and not merely as a beautiful but empty ideal. The publication of 2 Ellison Reconstituted Invisible Man suddenly and shockingly vaulted Ellison into the vanguard of American letters. He would be invited to join the American Academy of Letters and its inner circle, the Century Club. Arguably—and with apologies to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and, most obviously, Richard Wright—Ellison, within his lifetime, became the first “canonical” black American author. If Ellison’s sudden visibility as a great American author made him famous, it was perhaps even more remarkable that the seemingly entrenched historical situation that his book named was visibly changing as well. With the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, and in particular through the extraordinary leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., the invisibility that, for white Americans, had cloaked the humanity of black Americans was disappearing almost as quickly as a plantation house could burn down.Two years after Invisible Man, the Supreme Court put a legal end to segregation and Jim Crow with Brown v. Board of Education. By 1965, Lyndon Johnson, a white Southerner, had accomplished with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act what a Northern president likely could not have done: he had persuaded the United States Congress to ensure that all black Americans were afforded the “equal rights” that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had promised after the Civil War. The social contract between blacks and whites guaranteed by those amendments had been rescinded by what Du Bois and Ellison referred to as the “revolution of 1876,” which in effect said that in the South old times are not forgotten and that a new slavery as pernicious as any preceding it could be and was made the law of the land. After 1876 the rights of Southern blacks had become so inconsequential that by the 1890s blacks could be imprisoned or even killed at the will of white people. One reason that Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folks was to protest the exponential increase in lynching that had become so prevalent that people could and did purchase, in Bob Dylan’s words, “postcards of the hanging” as tourist souvenirs of places where such acts were tolerated, encouraged, and celebrated . As Danielle Allen argues in Talking to Strangers (2004), however, the post-Brown era touched off a “reconstitution” of American society that effectively restaged the Civil War as a victory for black Americans by authorizing their official and legal status as American citizens. Invisible Man was hailed by literary...

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