Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr. & Barack Obama

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“We dreamed a dream”: Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr. & Barack Obama

Eric J. Sundquist

When he spoke at the May 1965 conference organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on the topic of “The Negro Ameri- can,” Ralph Ellison found himself at odds with fellow participants. Although the proceedings took up a variety of interlocking issues–Was desegregation alone suf½cient to bring about racial justice? Would true integration require racial balancing? Was the goal cultural pluralism or a surrender of black identity to the melt- ing pot?–much of the discussion was predicat- ed on the idea that there were “two Americas.” That concept was reinforced three years later in the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Com- mission on Civil Disorders, which was published the same month that Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and warned that the nation was moving toward “two societies, one black and one white–separate and unequal.”1 Ellison, however, strenuously resisted the idea of two societies, two Americas–or “two ERIC J. SUNDQUIST, a Fellow of worlds of race,” to borrow the title that histori- the American Academy since 1997, an John Hope Franklin chose for his contribu- is the Andrew W. Mellon Profes- tion to the American Academy conference.2 sor in the Humanities at Johns Ellison did not deny that, by law and custom, Hopkins University. His publica- the color line divided the nation in hundreds tions include King’s Dream (2009), of ways both tragic and petty; nonetheless, he Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005), insisted that this view was myopic and counter- and To Wake the Nations: Race in productive to understanding American culture, the Making of American Literature for blacks and whites alike. “One concept that (1993). I wish we would get rid of,” he argued, “is the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 concept of a main stream of American novel, the work of ½ction from that era Eric J. culture–which is an exact mirroring of most likely to endure. His masterful col- Sundquist segregation and second-class citizenship.” lection of essays, Shadow and Act, was He asserted his allegiance to a form of enjoying wide praise following its publi- pluralism in which the “right to discover cation a year earlier, and although only what one wanted on the outside and what his panel comments appeared in the one could conveniently get rid of on the issues of Dædalus that grew out of the inside” was an essential means of nego- American Academy conference, The Na- tiating American identity shared by all tion published “Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” a ethnoracial groups. Ellison went on to surreal essay that had its origins in Elli- reject cultural Jim Crow in terms specif- son’s response a decade earlier to the ic to his craft: “I wish that we would dis- Southern Manifesto, the states-rights pense with this idea that we [Negroes] are declaration of war on Brown v. Board of begging to get in somewhere. The main Education signed by more than 90 percent stream is in oneself. The main stream of of Southern congressmen. Refusing to American literature is in me, even though join Robert Lowell and others who dis- I am a Negro, because I possess more dained an invitation to the White House of Mark Twain than many white writ- Festival of the Arts and Humanities in ers do.”3 protest of the war in Vietnam, Ellison The year 1965 was momentous for the welcomed President Johnson’s recogni- civil rights movement. In March, the tution. In 1965, he also published the short multuous, bloody voting-rights march story “Juneteenth,” a beautifully mod- from Selma to Montgomery concluded ulated antiphonal dialogue between a with King standing in the shadow of black preacher and his child protégé. Jefferson Davis, where his declamatory The story turned a vernacular rendition call-and-response reached backward to of Ezekiel’s prophecy in the Valley of a crusading hymn of Union soldiers and Dry Bones into a rousing allegory of forward to a day of redemption: the black nation Israel raised up from captivity in the Babylon of America How long? Not long, because the arc of and America itself reborn in justice. the moral universe is long but it bends “Juneteenth” was the fourth of eight toward justice. excerpts, published between 1960 and How long? Not long, because “Mine eyes 1977, from Ellison’s novel-in-progress. It have seen the glory of the coming of the showed him at the height of his powers, Lord.” poised to make good on the great promise of his ½rst novel. At the time of his In his own speech about Selma, Presi- death in 1994, however, Ellison left be- dent Lyndon Johnson made the move- hind twenty-seven boxes of manuscript ment’s anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” materials, including some three thousand into a national pledge to end “the crip- pages in computer ½les he had obsessive- pling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” ly revised starting in 1982, when he pur- And by August 1965, he signed the Vot- chased one of the ½rst Osborne comput- ing Rights Act. ers–but he left no second novel. With It was a good year for Ralph Ellison, the publication of Three Days before the too. A Book Week poll of two hundred Shooting . . .,4 a 1,100-page compilation of prominent writers, editors, and critics manuscript drafts dating back as far as named Invisible Man, his esteemed 1952 the early 1950s (some of which appeared

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph in truncated form in 1999 under the title Improvement Association; the year Ellison, Juneteenth), readers may ponder anew the Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi.6 Martin Luther prolonged creative indecision that has But Adam Sunraider is a man of masks. King, Jr. made Ralph Ellison the most highly re- He is born to a white woman who was & Barack Obama garded disappointment in the history of raped, but not by the black man lynched American literature. for the crime, and is midwifed by the Although critical assessment of Three dead man’s brother, the one-time jazz Days, as well as the Ellison archive at the trombonist Alonzo “Daddy” Hickman, Library of Congress, will take years, what who christens the boy Bliss and raises immediately becomes clear is the fact that him, despite his white skin, to be a Negro the novel was visibly, vibrantly responsive preacher like himself. Hickman accepts to the question of “the Negro American.” the convoluted grounds of atonement Ellison composed Invisible Man, which that Bliss’s birth mother offers up as a led its nameless protagonist through a salve for the boy’s likely bitterness–“let sequence of episodes that symbolically him learn to share the forgiveness your replicated the past century of African life has taught you,” she says–and he American life, from slavery through Jim believes he can instill in this “marvelous Crow, at a time when the end of segrega- child of Ishmaelian origin and pariah’s caste” tion could not have been predicted with the African American’s “stubborn vision any con½dence. Three Days, in turn, was and blues-tempered acceptance of this coun- meant to measure the political and social try’s turbulent reality.” He hopes to turn turmoil unleashed by Brown v. Board of Bliss ½rst into a spellbinding man of the Education in 1954. “Eyeballs were peeled, gospel and then into a new Abraham nerves were laid bare, and private sensi- Lincoln, through whom “the combined bilities were subjected to public lacera- promises of Scripture and this land’s Consti- tion,” Ellison would later say of the Su- tution would be at last ful½lled and made preme Court’s decision. Life became “so manifest.”7 theatrical (not to say nightmarish),” he As a child preacher, Bliss is trained to observed, “that even Dostoevsky’s smok- rise from a small cof½n on the cue, “Lord, ing imagination” could have stayed bare- why hast Thou forsaken me?” He acts ly a step ahead of what was happening in out this mock resurrection to dramatize, the streets.5 as Ellison explained in an interview with The present-day action of Three Days, writer and journalist John Hersey, “the which revolves around the attempted signi½cance of being a Negro in Amer- assassination of Adam Sunraider, a race- ica” in relation to “the problem of our baiting New England senator, occurs democratic faith as a whole.”8 After he is sometime during the years 1954 to 1957. traumatized by a demented white wom- Ellison once calculated the date with an’s attempt to claim him as her son, precision, ½xing the action in 1955: the however, Bliss nurses the delusion that year of Brown’s decree of implementa- the screen star Mary Pickford is his tion, with its notorious concession that mother and eventually escapes into the desegregation was to be undertaken world of whiteness where, for reasons “with all deliberate speed”; the year Rosa only hinted at, he becomes Adam Sun- Parks refused to give up her seat on the raider. But ½rst he reappears as an itin- bus to a white man; the year an unknown erant ½lmmaker who, while traveling minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., through Oklahoma circa 1930, seduces was elected president of the Montgomery a young woman named Lavatrice, who is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 part black, part white, and part Ameri- Three Days was conceived before King Eric J. can Indian. He leaves her pregnant with became a national ½gure, as Ellison was Sundquist a boy who will be named Severen, who constrained to point out when work on will grow up hating the father he never the novel stretched into its fourth decade; knew, and who will, at length, attempt to but the promise that King stood for ani- kill him as he is making an impassioned mates the novel. Although Ellison thought speech on the floor of the Senate, an event the national adulation subsequent to witnessed by Reverend Hickman and King’s assassination was a case of “mar- members of his congregation who have tyrdom endowing the martyr with a hell come to Washington, D.C., to warn the of a lot more following than he had dur- senator. This is the point at which Three ing his struggles,”12 his judgment was Days begins. directed not at King but at the nation. He Attempting to solve the riddle of Bliss’s was intrigued, too, by the fact that King life and death, more than one character had effectively entered “the realm of poli- asks, “What’s the plot of this thing?” In tics while trying to stay outside of it,”13 several instances, the question is patent- which may have been Ellison’s way of ly self-referential, effectively Ellison’s reflecting not just on his character Hick- own admission that, after forty years of man but also on his own role in the civil writing, he had produced, as another rights movement. Ellison’s refusal to be character puts it, only a “mare’s-nest, enlisted as a spokesman for black activ- jumble-riot of loose ends.”9 ism and his impatience with race nation- Having started with the premise of alists, whether black or white, are leg- Sunraider’s attempted assassination, endary.14 He was not, however, entirely Ellison may have been ambushed by aloof from the political arena. He ap- current events. As he remarked in 1974, peared at a 1964 conference organized the “eruption of assassinations” during by the Student Nonviolent Coordinat- the 1960s–John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, ing Committee and in 1965 at an event King, and Robert F. Kennedy–disorient- staged by the naacp’s Legal Defense ed his work on a book whose prevailing Fund, where he spoke on the meaning of mood he had intended to be comic.10 It Selma. Still, his art was his voice, and if may also be that he could not settle on a he granted in 1963 that King’s Birming- way to connect the Western and South- ham campaign proved that “marching ern imaginative geography of the book barehanded before police dogs and cattle he considered his “Oklahoma novel,” prods” expressed moral and physical cour- rich in the kind of African American lore age of the highest order, it was neither and autobiographical underpinning that disingenuous nor uncourageous for him prompted Invisible Man, with the politi- to say that he could best serve his people cal action unfolding in Washington. In “by trying to write as well as I can.”15 his working notes, Ellison characterized Ellison’s true purpose in Three Days may the city as “a place of power and mystery, well remain elusive, but the manuscripts frustration and possibility,”11 and it was contain daring writing whose eloquence also, of course, a place where King, on and invention rival, and sometimes sur- August 28, 1963, had seized the national pass, the best parts of Invisible Man. It is stage and come closer than anyone since possible, moreover, to discern a story that Lincoln to making manifest the “com- responds to the hard questions confront- bined promises of Scripture and this ed, but by no means solved, in Brown– land’s Constitution.” questions thrown into high relief once

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph again by the presidential campaign and Ellison would more likely have seen Ellison, election of Barack Obama. him as an agent of historical chaos. Martin Luther Reflecting on Ellison’s failure to com- King, Jr. he “action takes place on the eve of plete his second novel, Toni Morrison & Barack T Obama the [Civil] Rights movement but it fore- told literary scholar Arnold Rampersad casts the chaos which would come later,” that Ellison was trying to revive the Ellison remarked in a working note ap- “senile ‘tragic mulatto’ genre,” which parently meant to turn the temporal frac- Faulkner had mastered in novels such tures and anachronisms introduced by as Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, his protracted composition into a virtue and which might have served Ellison rather than a liability.16 “Chaos” was a well had his novel appeared soon after recurrent, almost totemic term in Ellison’s Invisible Man but was of no use after the vocabulary. It spoke ½rst to the obliga- civil rights revolution. By then, she said, tions of the writer, whose role, he said, “the story was dead.”20 Ellison was clear- was to reduce “the chaos of human ex- ly alert to the destructive logic of the one- perience to artistic form.”17 But it spoke drop rule that governed most American also to the debilitating conditions of Afri- discourse about race until well after the can American life and to trans½guring 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. moments of national crisis when hier- Virginia overthrew anti-miscegenation archies are toppled and the social order laws still in force in more than twenty wrenched apart. Through King, he be- states. Even as he passes with seeming lieved, the black church had made itself ease, Ellison’s character Bliss may also visible in the political life of the nation share the combined rage, guilt, and des- and counteracted the “imposed chaos perate confusion of Joe Christmas, Faulk- which has been the Negro American ex- ner’s white Negro. But Morrison’s infer- perience.”18 In an essay on Lyndon John- ence misconceives Ellison’s purpose, son, Ellison called Abraham Lincoln an which is only tangentially concerned embodiment of “democratic grandeur with race-mixing as such. (“We are all and political sainthood,” yet he remind- mongrels in America,”21 he once ob- ed us that Lincoln was an unpopular served.) Rather, the burden of the book and “troubled man who rode the whirl- was spelled out in a letter Ellison wrote wind of national chaos until released by his former Tuskegee professor Morteza death.” A great president, he said admir- Sprague two days after Brown was hand- ingly of Johnson, is “one through whom ed down: the essential conflicts of democracy . . . So now the Court found in our favor and are brought into the most intense and recognized our human psychological creative focus. He is the one who releases complexity and citizenship and another 19 Ellison chaos and he creates order.” battle of the Civil War has been won. did not live long enough to witness The rest is up to us and I’m very glad. . . . the rise of Barack Obama, who self-con- Now I’m writing about the evasion of sciously unites the combined promise identity which is another characteristi- of King and socially transformative pres- cally American problem which must be idents like Lincoln and Johnson, and about to change. I hope so, it’s giving me whose degree of “blackness” has pro- enough trouble. Anyway, here’s to inte- duced its own riddles. Where others gration, the only integration that counts: have been inclined to see Obama as the that of the personality.22 ful½llment of King’s dream, however,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 An arch-segregationist, Adam Sunraid- you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, Eric J. er seems to stand in stark contrast to ½g- and giveth thee a sign or a wonder.” King Sundquist ures such as Lincoln, King, and Johnson, took up this language on a number of oc- not to mention Obama. It is the preacher casions, including his 1960 address “The Hickman, Ellison once noted to himself, Negro and the American Dream.” “In a who foreshadows King, while Sunraider real sense,” King argued on that occasion, represents “the betrayals of the past.”23 “America is essentially a dream–a dream When he ½rst took shape as a character yet unful½lled.” The sublime promise of in the mid-1950s, however, Bliss derived the Declaration of Independence was an directly from Bliss Proteus Rinehart, the “eloquent and unequivocal expression of con man and trickster of Invisible Man the dignity and worth of all human per- whom Ellison considered the “personi- sonality.” And yet ever since “the found- ½cation of chaos.”24 A political and cul- ing fathers of our nation dreamed this tural hybrid of uncertain progeny, Bliss/ dream,” he continued, stating a familiar Sunraider is a variation on the mythic idea that dates to the ½rst abolitionists, Icarus, who perishes when he flies too the nation had manifested “a schizo- close to the sun after escaping the Mino- phrenic personality,” professing liberty an labyrinth on waxen wings fashioned to all and paradoxically denying it at the by his father, Daedalus; and he is also, same time.28 as Hickman thinks of him, a “mammy- This conception of the Founders’ made American Adam shaped out of this ter- dream as a kind of self-verifying truth rible confusion. Neither black nor white but as that makes the nation and the dream one much a mystery as when some folks hear thick and the same, reiterated in our own day lips give voice to Shakespeare, Lincoln, or the from King’s speeches through Barack Word.”25 As a trickster in whom lethal Obama’s repeated appeals to the Consti- contrary impulses are united, he embod- tution’s promise to “form a more perfect ies the “whirlwind of national chaos” union,” might be dismissed as so much set loose by the nation’s long-delayed at- beguiling rhetoric–the province of “I tempt to end its own evasion of identity. have a dream” and “Yes we can.” As Elli- Hickman’s congregation expected that son asked at the American Academy con- Bliss would dispel the shadow of slavery ference, “[W]hy do we demand that ter- and Jim Crow and hoped that “a little gift- rible, encyclopedic nuances be found in ed child would speak for our condition from the slogans of the civil rights movement? inside the only acceptable mask,” the mask No slogans have ever had that kind of of whiteness. More succinctly, Hickman complexity.”29 Ellison was, however, recalls, “we dreamed a dream,”26 a tauto- keenly interested in the strange tautolo- logical formulation with a resonant Afri- gy of the “dream the dreamers dreamed.” can American typology. For him, as for King and Obama, the in- “Let America be the dream the dream- strumental ½gure was Abraham Lincoln, ers dreamed,” wrote Langston Hughes in whose “great soul” and “perfect capacity his 1936 poem “Let America Be America for sacri½ce,” as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, Again,”27 a lyrical redundancy with bib- derived not only from his self-schooling lical overtones: consider, for instance, and his integrity but also from “his Genesis 37:5, “And Joseph dreamed a dreaming.”30 dream, and he told it [to] his brethren: and they hated him yet the more”; or When Senator Barack Obama an- Deuteronomy 13:1, “If there arise among nounced his presidential candidacy in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph Spring½eld, Illinois, he challenged his had at last begun to proceed “according Ellison, supporters to “take up the un½nished to the original script–by which I mean Martin 32 Luther business of perfecting our union” and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” King, Jr. prepare to “usher in a new birth of free- The extent to which Obama’s election & Barack 31 Obama dom on this earth.” These Lincolnian signals the conclusion of the post-Brown aspirations, borrowed from the Gettys- age can be clari½ed if we turn to the more burg Address, became a staple of Obama’s complex ways in which King and Ellison campaign rhetoric, but they were inev- used Lincoln. itably ½ltered–both in the words he At a 1961 White House luncheon for spoke and in the very fact of his candi- civil rights leaders, King noticed an en- dacy–through the image and language graving of the Emancipation Proclama- of King. Although Obama often used tion in the Lincoln Room. He challenged King instrumentally, linking him to President Kennedy to “stand in this room past leaders of civil rights organizations and sign a Second Emancipation Procla- whose support he courted, his allusions mation outlawing segregation, one hun- were just as often oblique. Examples in- dred years after Lincoln’s.”33 Fearful of clude Obama’s frequent borrowing of alienating Southern Democrats, the pres- King’s phrase about “the arc of the moral ident limited his recognition of the cen- universe” bending toward justice (which tennial to a banal prerecorded message King had borrowed from the abolitionist played at the Lincoln Memorial on Sep- Theodore Parker) and his nomination tember 22, 1962 (the centennial of the acceptance speech, delivered on the forty- Preliminary Emancipation Proclama- ½fth anniversary of the March on Wash- tion) and a reception for black leaders ington, when he identi½ed King only as to commemorate Lincoln’s birthday in “a young preacher from Georgia” whose February 1963. Ellison gladly accepted interracial message gave the nation hope Kennedy’s invitation to the reception that “together, our dreams can be one.” and refused to add his name to a letter By the night of November 4, 2008, when calling on the president to take a tough- the president-elect declared that “we as er stand on civil rights. King signed the a people will get there”–namely, to the letter and declined the invitation, elect- Promised Land that King had envisioned ing instead to issue his own Second on the eve of his assassination in Mem- Emancipation Proclamation at the phis–and that “this is our time . . . to March on Washington. reclaim the American dream,” Obama’s King’s commemoration of Lincoln’s election was bound to be perceived as “momentous decree” in his “I Have a the prophesied ful½llment of the dream Dream” speech was captivating not only “deeply rooted in the American dream” for its cascading rhetoric–the Proclama- made famous by King in 1963. tion, he said, came as “a great beacon Obama’s allusions to Lincoln and King light of hope to millions of Negro slaves were a carefully tuned means to acquire who had been seared in the flames of the aura of their authority, much as King withering injustice . . . as a joyous day- himself had done with Lincoln in his break to end the long night of their cap- opening words at the March on Wash- tivity”–but also for what it assumed ington. More than clichés, however, they about the deeper signi½cance of Lincoln’s also seemed to portend the triumphant dry military order. In his opening words, end of a political age that started with “Fivescore years ago,” so antique and Brown, when, as Ellison put it, the nation magical, King evoked Lincoln before not

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 quite naming him in the remainder of his political birth of a nation,” Douglass con- Eric J. sentence: “a great American, in whose tended, but the other date will determine Sundquist symbolic shadow we stand today, signed whether the nation’s “life and character the Emancipation Proclamation.”34 Inso- shall be radiantly glorious with all high far as King’s purpose, as he immediately and noble virtues, or infamously black- stated, was to address the meaning of the ened, forevermore.”35 Proclamation in its centennial year, his The Emancipation Proclamation, allusion to Lincoln’s best-known speech, like Lincoln, became the stuff of myth the Gettysburg Address, might at ½rst among African Americans, whether in seem a rhetorical trick. After all, how the tall tales that “Father Abraham” him- many people would recognize “Whereas self had appeared at Southern plantations on the twentysecond day of September,” to announce freedom or in the legend the Proclamation’s opening words? In that news of emancipation reached slaves his subtle merging of the two documents, in Texas only on June 19, 1865, thus lead- however, King underlined his belief that ing to the black folk holiday of Juneteenth. the salvation of the Union, Lincoln’s top- Ellison celebrated the centennial of June- ic in the Gettysburg Address, depended teenth ½rst by publishing his 1965 short on the emancipation Lincoln had pro- story of the same name and then, as claimed one year earlier. though in tribute to Douglass, by setting King’s emulation of Lincoln was even an incident critical to the plot of Three more explicit in “The Death of Evil upon Days before the Shooting on an Oklaho- the Seashore,” a sermon he ½rst preached ma Juneteenth observed on the Fourth on the second anniversary of Brown and of July. “By celebrating Independence then revised for inclusion in Strength to and Emancipation on the same day,” he Love (1963) and also in Where Do We Go writes of the revelers, “they were mak- from Here? (1967). Adapting the story of ing the Fourth of July both more glori- the biblical Exodus to the century-long ous and more American.”36 struggle for black freedom, King located In his book on the Emancipation Proc- the “moral foundation” of the Emanci- lamation, written for its centennial, John pation Proclamation in the explanation Hope Franklin lamented that this “great Lincoln offered to Congress on Decem- American document of freedom” had ber 1, 1862: “In giving freedom to the long been unjustly neglected.37 But in slave, we assure freedom to the free,– Ellison’s post-Brown imagination, no less honorable alike in what we give and what than King’s, Lincoln and his decree had we preserve.” The South had once again very much come to life. His essay “Tell risen up in rebellion against federal au- It Like It Is, Baby” recounted a personal thority, King argued, and a Second Eman- nightmare provoked by the Southern cipation Proclamation was needed to re- campaign of massive resistance against deem the principles of the Declaration Brown. In the dream, Ellison’s dead father of Independence and the Constitution. turned into the body of Lincoln in its He buttressed his argument by quoting funeral cortege, and Ellison, “fallen out Frederick Douglass’s commentary on of time into chaos,” took on the role of the Day of Jubilee: “The Fourth of July a young slave powerless to stop a white was great,” said Douglass, but January 1, mob’s rowdy desecration of the corpse 1863, “when we consider it in all its rela- of the president, “the old coon.”38 The tionships and bearings, is incomparably racial ambiguity sarcastically attributed greater. The one had respect to the mere to Lincoln in Ellison’s nightmare re-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph appears in Three Days, though with a segregationists of his own day who fea- Ellison, different tenor, when Hickman and his tured Lincoln’s opposition to intermar- Martin Luther congregants interrupt their search for riage in speeches and publications, such King, Jr. Senator Sunraider to make a pilgrimage as Tom Brady’s 1955 broadside Black Mon- & Barack Obama to the Lincoln Memorial. Contemplat- day, so named for the day on which Brown ing the “mystery being cast by the great was handed down and subtitled Segrega- sculptural form before him,” Hickman tion or Amalgamation . . . America Has Its falls into a long meditation on Lincoln’s Choice. What Hickman sees in Lincoln’s inscrutable motives and his trans½xing “sorrowful eyes”–what all African Amer- gaze, its “shadowed lids [open] toward icans who brought their protests to the some vista of perpetual dawn that lay far Lincoln Memorial, from Marian Ander- beyond in½nity.” Regardless of the com- son and Paul Robeson to King and the bination of political calculation, military Black Panthers, saw in them–is a man necessity, and idealism that drove him, who struggled “to reconcile all of the con- Hickman decides, it is enough to know tending forces of his country” and point the only that Lincoln “signed the papers way “for all who are willing to pay the hard that set us free” and “dealt us into the price of true freedom.” “So yes,” Hickman game.”39 concludes, “he’s one of us.”42 More intriguing, however, is Hickman’s Along with his identi½cation of Abra- reflection on the possibility that it was ham Lincoln as the ½rst “black” presi- Lincoln’s brooding expression, not “the dent, Ellison’s rendition of the Eman- darkness of his flesh, the cast of his features, cipation Proclamation in the raucous or what he did on our behalf” that made his Juneteenth sermon relived by Bliss/ enemies accuse him of “being one of us.” Sunraider and Hickman, as Sunraider Ellison’s interest here lies less in Lincoln’s lies gravely wounded and delirious in repeated need to insist, as in his debates the hospital and Hickman keeps vigil at with Stephen Douglas, that he did not his bedside, is a vernacular expression wish to marry a black woman, in lam- of his deep conviction that only when poons of his “Miscegenation Proclama- emancipation has been completed tion,” or in charges that he was secretly through the dismantling of segregation black.40 Ellison meant to answer not the can the dream the dreamers dreamed racists of Lincoln’s day but later segrega- begin to become a reality. tionists who had reclaimed Lincoln as a The sermon proceeds through a long friend of the South, among them Thomas exposition of exile and dispossession Dixon, whose novels The Leopard’s Spots derived from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry and The Clansman inspired D. W. Grif½th’s Bones (Ezekiel 37:1–14) in which the infamous 1915 ½lm The Birth of a Nation, Negro people, reborn into a new sense as well as the dignitaries overseeing the of nation time, a new cadence of history dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in and culture, are raised up from captivity: 1922, when black guests were seated in “We lay scattered in the ground for a a segregated section and Robert Russa long dry season. And the winds blew and Moton, successor to Booker T. Wash- the sun blazed down and the rains came ington as head of the Tuskegee Institute and went and we were dead. Lord, we during Ellison’s student days, had his were dead!” But at last “the nerves of speech censored by those determined to organs and limbs are joined together, erase any hint of racial or sectional con- one by one, and the body of the dead flict.41 Ellison likewise meant to answer Negro people is resurrected,” until “we

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 sprang together and walked around. All speech seems mainly a paean to the Eric J. clacking together and clicking into place. glorious ideals of the Founders. “It is Sundquist All moving in time!”43 In the rhythmic our nature to soar and by following the idioms of the black gospel, the sermon courses mapped through the adventur- magni½es the down-home delight Elli- ous efforts of our fathers we af½rm and son took in writing to his friend Albert revitalize their awesome vision,” he Murray about Brown in 1956. “Mose,” he declares. Although “our sublime and said, collectively naming black people by cornucopian dream” will be ful½lled the colloquial rendering of Moses, a wily only at great anguish and cost, it is the visionary forever bound for the Promised challenge of a “rash dream” to which Land, “is ½ghting and . . . he’s turned the “only a great and uni½ed nation, a na- Supreme Court into the forum of liberty tion conditioned to riding out the cha- it was intended to be, and the Constitu- os of history as the eagle rides out the tion of the United States into a briarpatch whirlwind, can arise.” As overwrought in which the nimble people, the willing as it is opaque, Sunraider’s barnstorm- people, have a chance.”44 ing dream speech appears to have little Read in the context of the attempted to do with race until he drifts into a meta- assassination of Sunraider, however, the phoric illustration of the power of “the Juneteenth sermon’s baroque mixture of dark side” to offer a “corrective to the holiness and theatricality seems more bedazzlement fostered by the brightness foreboding: “the celebration of a gaudy illu- of our ideals and our history.” Who can sion,”45 as the delusional Sunraider thinks doubt our future, he exclaims, suddenly of it. We are led to the same conclusion veering into a parable, when from the fact that Ellison chose a June- even the wildest black man rampaging teenth holiday celebrated on the Fourth the streets of our cities in a Fleetwood of July as the occasion on which Bliss, [Cadillac] knows that it is not our fate returning to Oklahoma as a white ½lm- to be mere victims of history but to be maker known only as Mister Movie-Man, courageous and insightful before its as- dresses the black townspeople appearing saults and riddles. Let us keep an eye on in his ½lm in garish Halloween costumes the outrages committed by the citizens and seduces the young mixed-race wom- I’ve just described, for perhaps therein an who gives birth to the son who will lies a secret brightness, a clue. Perhaps attempt to kill him. the essence of his untamed and assertive How Ellison ultimately intended to or- willfulness, his crass and jazzy de½ance chestrate all these symbolically charged of good taste and the harsh, immutable elements of his story we may never know. laws of economics, lies [in] his faith in In the grandiloquent speech Sunraider is the flexible soundness of the nation. making when Severen rises in the Senate gallery and brings him down in a hail of “Much mystery here,” Sunraider goes bullets, however, we can identify a further on to say, a comment we are apparently point of contact for reading Three Days meant to connect to his counsel earlier as Ellison’s meditation on the turbulent in the speech that “great nations shall confusions of the post-Brown world. not, must not, dare not evade their own Full of wild rhetorical flights, but noth- mysteries but must grapple with them ing resembling the Southern Manifesto and live them out.”46 or the states-rights oratory of a George Sunraider’s seemingly incongruous Wallace or a Ross Barnett, Sunraider’s parable refers to a chronologically prior

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph episode of Three Days (one Ellison pub- man remembers that when Bliss “seceded Ellison, lished in 1973 as the short story “Cadil- by losing himself in the black-denying world Martin Luther lac Flambé”) in which the character of skin whiteness,” once again, “as in the days King, Jr. LeeWillie Minifees protests Sunraider’s of our fathers, we were left puzzled by the wreck & Barack Obama radio speech denouncing the African of our dreaming. For in the mysterious spell of American penchant for stylish Cadil- our yearning our little orphan of mixed identi- lacs by ostentatiously setting his own ty had become one of us”–the new Lincoln Cadillac ablaze on the senator’s lawn. who would redeem the nation’s betrayal By itself, the episode is an extravagant of blacks after the ½rst Reconstruction tour de force, one of several in the novel, by leading the way to the second Recon- but it is Sunraider’s recurrence to the struction. Hickman hopes that Bliss, by mysteries of identity that the nation “devious scheming” in the guise of Senator “dare not evade”–Ellison’s premise Sunraider, is playing a part through which for the novel–that should catch our “the child’s promise will be made manifest in attention here. the present–here in the District of Colum- In his notes for Three Days, Ellison bia!”; yet he is left to conclude ruefully presented conflicting motives for Sun- that he and his congregation will proba- raider’s racist demagoguery, speculating, bly have to leave “the Founding Fathers’ on the one hand, that he sees himself as dream of eternal bliss to the future.”49 “putting pressure on Negroes to become “There lies the nation groaning on its more powerful through political action” bed,”50 Ellison writes of Sunraider after and yet, on the other, that he feels humil- the shooting, as though to say that the iated by his own racial ambiguity and generation still beholden to the mythol- thus uses the “agency of racism to punish ogies of white supremacy is in its death Negroes for being weak, and to achieve throes, slain by the generation that has power of his own.” At the same time, transcended racialized identity. In Sun- Ellison surmised that Sunraider is to be raider’s parable of the Cadillac, however, killed by way of proving that Severen, Ellison appears to offer “a secret bright- the “unexpected emotional agent of ness, a clue,” in the senator himself. Small chaos,” was “free of [the] acceptance hint though it may be, Sunraider’s asser- of whiteness which was [the] source of tion that the Cadillac driver’s “crass and Bliss’s confusion.”47 Whereas Sunraid- jazzy de½ance” is evidence of “his faith er wrestled with the demon of his own in the soundness of the nation” suggests belief in the superiority of whiteness, that Sunraider may indeed have been that is to say, Severen, for ½lial as well as scheming to speak for his people, Hick- allegorical reasons, was destined to slay man’s people, from behind the mask of the father who remained tragically shack- whiteness. As a new and more cunning led to the racial dichotomies of Jim Crow. invisible man, he may even have been “If you accept the fact that you’re neither preparing to divulge his racial secret, his black nor white, Gentile nor Jew, Rebel- own evasion of identity, when he is cut bred nor Yankee-born,” Severen is told down by his son the assassin. Whether by a black American Indian shaman who or not it foreshadows the revelation of a seems to be glossing the conclusion of new Lincoln from within the trickster’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “you racist disguise, Sunraider’s parable illus- have the freedom to be truly free.”48 trates, as Ellison said in nearly countless Reflecting on his prodigal son in the formulations stretching from the early hours leading up to the shooting, Hick- 1950s to the end of his life, that the Negro,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 both morally and linguistically, had en- rative to the point of being utopian, may Eric J. tered “the deepest recesses of the Ameri- also put him in strange company. Having Sundquist can psyche,” there becoming “the keep- denounced the Supreme Court’s deci- er of the nation’s sense of democratic sion in the Dred Scott case as doing vio- achievement, and the human scale by lence to “the plain unmistakable lan- which would be measured its painfully guage” of the Declaration of Indepen- slow advance toward true equality.”51 dence, Lincoln was quick to add in a well- known passage that the Founding Fathers Whatever Three Days may say indirect- had not created the conditions of equal- ly about the dream dreamed by Martin ity; rather, they set forth “a standard Luther King, Jr., it can, of course, in no maxim for free society . . . constantly way refer to Barack Obama, except by looked to, constantly labored for, and the happenstance of its publication in even though never perfectly attained, 2010. It is useful to note, however, that constantly approximated, and thereby Obama’s casting back to Abraham Lin- constantly spreading and deepening its coln and Frederick Douglass by way of influence, and augmenting the happi- King’s belief that the Declaration of ness and value of life to all people of all Independence and the Preamble to the colors everywhere.” In a 1987 lecture, Constitution formed a long-standing none other than future Supreme Court and still valid “promissory note” was Justice Clarence Thomas embraced the not only a political strategy for which need “to recover the moral horizons” he was especially well suited. It was also of Lincoln’s views, as stated in this a means of demonstrating, as he wrote passage.54 in Dreams from My Father, that the law is Having set forth in quest of the pres- the record of “a nation arguing with its idency when contention over af½rma- conscience”–or, as Ellison put it, a means tive action had somewhat receded from of playing out the “nation’s drama of public consciousness, Obama had the conscience.”52 As Obama explained it in luxury of returning to perspectives on his March 2008 speech on race, entitled equal opportunity that often sounded “A More Perfect Union” and designed to less like King and Johnson and more counter attacks provoked by his associa- like Kennedy.55 In his nomination action with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, ceptance speech, for example, he de- “the answer to the slavery question was ½ned the American “promise” as one already embedded within our Constitu- based on the ideal that “each of us has tion,” which promises “liberty, and jus- the freedom to make of our own lives tice, and a union that could be and should what we will,” a principle he reaf½rmed be perfected over time.” in his inaugural speech, calling it “the Whereas Obama’s election itself may God-given promise that all are equal, all seem to meet the requirements of the are free, and all deserve a chance to pur- “American Creed” set forth in economist sue their full measure of happiness.” It and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 may be that only an avowedly biracial study An American Dilemma–faith in “the candidate who styled himself a “citizen essential dignity of the individual human of the world,” as Obama did in a July being, of the fundamental equality of all 2008 speech in Berlin, and who put im- men, and of certain inalienable rights to migrants who “traveled across oceans in freedom, justice, and a fair opportuni- search of a new life” on the same plane ty”53–his Lincolnian language, amelio- as slaves who “endured the lash of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph whip and plowed the hard earth,” as he “requires all Americans to realize that Ellison, did in his inauguration speech, could your dreams do not have to come at the Martin Luther ½nally hope to escape stalemated argu- expense of my dreams.” King, Jr. ments about the “two worlds of race” Infelicitously, we might say that Obama & Barack Obama and the color blindness of the Consti- took the part of the trans-racial Severen, tution. slaying the father who, like Adam Sun- Questions that have reached a stale- raider, was unable to overcome “the mate, however, are questions that have betrayals of the past.” Or did candidate yet to be answered. For all that Obama’s Obama more resemble Hickman’s fanta- diffusing the issue of race might seem to sy of Bliss the redeemer? “We saw in him imply about an end to the post-Brown age, an answer to our hopes that this divided land his choice to designate himself “black” with its diversity of people would at last be –and black alone–in the 2010 Census made whole,” Hickman remembers, “a acknowledged that a national dilemma means of breaking the slavery-forged chains centuries in the making could not be which still bind our country.”57 If Barack resolved by one exceptional man’s life Obama’s election ful½lled King’s dream story and aspirations, still less by one as it has been distilled in popular iconog- campaign-saving speech. raphy, however, the notion that he could After he recalled Reverend Wright’s heal the divided land and usher in a post- many good works in his Philadelphia racial age was bound to be revealed as a speech, Obama attributed Wright’s in- fantasy in its own right. cendiary language about racial and eco- Ellison, no doubt, would be appalled nomic injustice at home and abroad– by such a naked attempt to discover ana- language that had much in common with logues to his novel in quotidian politics. King’s later jeremiads–to Wright’s out- Politicians are not preachers, and novel- dated, “distorted view of this country– ists are neither. Yet what he seems to a view that sees white racism as endem- have been after in Three Days before the ic, and that elevates what is wrong with Shooting . . .–what apparently eluded his America above all that we know is right agonized, decades-long effort to capture with America.” Obama emphasized that it to his own satisfaction–was a way to he had “brothers, sisters, nieces, neph- portray in novelistic fashion his belief ews, uncles and cousins, of every race that political integration and cultural in- and every hue, scattered across three tegration, even if they carried with them continents,” but he also strove to recog- distinct histories and proceeded by dif- nize the racial grievances of whites and fering logics, were intimately entangled recall that the old poison of Jim Crow in the nation’s long effort to form a more lingered in his own white grandmother perfect union. As he wrote in “What no less than in Jeremiah Wright. Having America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” made himself a “racial Everyman,” to a 1970 Time magazine essay that returned use writer and editor David Remnick’s to Ezekiel’s prophecy, the “jazz-shaped” phrase,56 he chose once more to stand history of black Americans had enliv- in the mythic shadows of King and Lin- ened the “dry bones of the nation” with coln, and through them the Founders a “tragic knowledge we try ceaselessly to themselves. “This union may never be evade: that the true subject of democra- perfect,” he conceded, but continuing cy is not simply material well-being but on the path toward a more perfect un- the extension of the democratic process ion, the only option for a great nation, in the direction of perfecting itself.”58

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ellison’s curiously but appropriately dis- can only wonder how his words and Eric J. tended syntax suggested a project with- deeds, like those of Lincoln and King, Sundquist out end–a project, perhaps, not unlike would have registered in Ralph Ellison’s his novel. As Barack Obama rides his imagination. own whirlwind of national chaos, we

endnotes 1 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 1, 236. 2 John Hope Franklin, “The Two Worlds of Race: A Historical View,” Dædalus 94 (4) (Fall 1965): 899–920. 3 Ralph Ellison, “Transcript of the American Academy Conference on the Negro Ameri- can–May 14–15, 1965,” Dædalus 95 (1) (Winter 1966): 414, 409, 437. 4 Ralph Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . .: The Un½nished Second Novel, ed. John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley (New York: Random House, 2010). The ellipsis in the title was devised by the editors to indicate the un½nished nature of the novel. The editors provide a fair amount of information about the state of Ellison’s manuscripts and his process of composition, but I have also bene½ted from Adam Bradley’s book Ralph Elli- son in Progress (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010) and, for additional bio- graphical information, from Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 5 John Hersey and Ralph Ellison, “‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph Elli- son” (1974), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 803. 6 Ibid., 814; Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 88. 7 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 526–527. Passages in italics represent Hickman’s interior monologue, which at times seems as much an authorial assessment as a character’s meditation. 8 Hersey and Ellison, “‘A Completion of Personality,’” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 791. 9 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 85, 74. The editors have organized the materials into three “books.” A long sequence designated as Book I traces the steps of Hickman and members of his congregation after they are rebuffed at Senator Sunraider’s Washing- ton, D.C., of½ce and try to track him down before at last witnessing his attempted murder from their seats in the gallery of the Senate. Other scenes, presented as Book II and built on a dialogue between Hickman and Sunraider as he lies dying in the hospital–most of which were published in a somewhat different sequence as Juneteenth–are a kaleidoscopic improvisational assemblage of conversation, memory, and hallucination reaching back to Hickman’s life before and after Bliss’s birth, and dwelling on their evangelical tent show, Bliss’s trauma, and events surrounding the affair that leads to the birth of the son he aban- dons. Still other scenes comprise the shooting and its immediate aftermath, narrated largely from the perspective of a white reporter named Welborn McIntyre, or follow Hickman on a picaresque journey through Georgia and Oklahoma as he attempts to unravel the mystery of Bliss’s transformation into Adam Sunraider and at the same time discover enough about Severen to warn the senator of the plot against his life. 10 Hersey and Ellison, “‘A Completion of Personality,’” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 791.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph 11 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 972. Ellison, 12 Martin Hollie West, “Ellison: Exploring the Life of a Not So Visible Man” (1973), in Conversations Luther with Ralph Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of King, Jr. Mississippi, 1995), 243. & Barack 13 Obama Hersey and Ellison, “‘A Completion of Personality,’” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 814. 14 Take, for example, Ellison’s response to Irving Howe, who had championed Richard Wright’s politicized naturalism as the only authentic black aesthetic in the essay “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Ellison famously took Howe to task for assuming that black art could be nothing but the “abstract embodiment of living hell” and charged him with practicing his own brand of segregation: “I found it far less painful to have to move to the back of a Southern bus . . . than to tolerate concepts which distorted the actual reality of my situation or my reactions to it”; Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug” (1963), Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 112, 122. 15 Allen Geller, “An Interview with Ralph Ellison” (1963), in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Graham and Singh, 82. 16 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 972. 17 Richard Kostelanetz, “An Interview with Ralph Ellison” (1965), in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Graham and Singh, 97. 18 Hersey and Ellison, “‘A Completion of Personality,’” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 813. 19 Ralph Ellison, “The Myth of the Flawed Southerner” (1968), Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 82, 84. Ellison concluded his essay by saying that Johnson would be recognized “as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes”; see page 87. In a 1965 interview, Ellison had argued that Johnson’s famous commencement speech at Howard University–arguably the era’s most forceful statement that compensa- tory treatment was needed to bring about racial justice–spelled out “the meaning of full integration” in a way that neither Lincoln nor Franklin Roosevelt had ever done: “There was no hedging in it, no escape clauses.” Johnson reiterated the essential points from that speech in the Foreword he provided for the ½rst of the two Dædalus issues on “The Negro American.” See Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline” (1965), Going to the Territory, 291. 20 Toni Morrison, quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 359. 21 David L. Carson, “Ralph Ellison: Twenty Years After” (1971), in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Graham and Singh, 198. 22 Ralph Ellison, letter to Morteza Sprague, May 19, 1954, in John F. Callahan, “‘American Culture is of a Whole’: From the Letters of Ralph Ellison,” The New Republic, March 1, 1999, 38–39. 23 Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Random House, 1999), 356. 24 Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview” (1955), Shadow and Act, 181. 25 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 741. In one Washington scene, Hickman muses on a tapestry of Brueghel’s painting Landscape and the Fall of Icarus and associates it with, among other things, Bliss’s self-destruction as Adam Sunraider; see 592–599. Cf. Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 49–50. 26 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 271. 27 Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” (1935), in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 189.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 28 Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Negro and the American Dream,” September 25, 1960, in Eric J. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson et al., 6 vols. to date (Berkeley: Sundquist University of California Press, 1992–), vol. V, 508. 29 Ellison, “Transcript of the American Academy Conference on the Negro American,” 409. 30 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Abraham Lincoln” (1907), in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 249, 252. 31 For all quotations from the speeches of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate (including his inaugural speech), see http://www.barackobama.com/speeches. 32 Ralph Ellison, “Address to the Harvard Alumni, Class of 1949” (1974), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 423. 33 Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 518. 34 All quotations from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech follow the text reprinted in Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), from which some of the ideas in this essay are drawn. 35 Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” in Strength to Love (1963; repr., Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 77–86. See also Frederick Douglass, “January First, 1863” (January 1863), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1950), vol. III, 306. 36 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 896. 37 John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1963), vi. 38 Ralph Ellison, “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” (1965), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 36–37. 39 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 575–576, 609–610. 40 On the racist responses to Lincoln, see Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53–79. 41 See Adam Fairclough, “Civil Rights and the Lincoln Memorial: The Censored Speeches of Robert R. Moton (1922) and John Lewis (1963),” The Journal of Negro History 82 (Autumn 1997): 408–416. 42 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 575–576. 43 Ibid., 320–321. 44 Ralph Ellison, letter to Albert Murray, March 16, 1956, in Trading Twelves: The Selected Let- ters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 117. 45 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 314. 46 Ibid., 238–243. 47 Ellison, Juneteenth, 360; Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 974–976. 48 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 850. When we let freedom ring, said King in the memorable ending of his speech, “we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” 49 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 527–529. 50 Ibid., 316.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00063 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ralph 51 Ralph Ellison, “Perspective of Literature” (1976), Going to the Territory, 335. Ellison, 52 Martin Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; repr., New Luther York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 437; Ellison, “Perspective of Literature,” Going to the King, Jr. Territory, 335. & Barack 53 Obama Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (1944; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996), vol. I, 4. 54 Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Spring½eld, Illinois,” June 26, 1857, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. II, 405–406; Clarence Thomas, “Why Black Americans Should Look to Conservative Policies,” The Heritage Lectures (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Founda- tion, 1987), 8. “Equality of rights, not of possessions or entitlements, offered the opportunity to be free, and self-governing,” argued Thomas. He contended that the last prominent American to appeal to this “natural law,” which “both transcends and underlies time and place, race and custom,” was Martin Luther King, Jr. 55 See, for example, President Kennedy’s televised speech of June 11, 1963, on civil rights; he said that blacks had a right to expect that “the Constitution will be color blind” and insisted, therefore, that all children must have an “equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.” John F. Ken- nedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Of½ce, 1964), 471. 56 David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 524. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., went further, telling Remnick that Obama, in his Philadelphia speech, had become a “post-modern Frederick Douglass,” a trickster capable of mediating seemingly irreconcilable positions. 57 Ellison, Three Days before the Shooting . . ., 526–527. 58 Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970), Going to the Territory, 110–111.

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