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

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Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr. & Barack Obama “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 plural- ism 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 © 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 108 Dædalus Winter 2011 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 tu- tion. 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 prom- ise 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 Dædalus Winter 2011 109 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 110 Dædalus Winter 2011 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.
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