Historical Background

 Written in 1945 in Waitsfield, Vermont – won the National Book

Award in 1953
 Ellison had an experimental attitude
 Believed ideas did not necessarily have to be connected to a specific
movement
 Ellison was a musician – his writing style mimics that of jazz –
improvisation and imagery
 Speaks to the relationship between Marxism and the black identity
 Considered to be one of the greatest novels in American history
 Ralph Ellison

 Born March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City, OK

 Named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, his father wanted him to be a

poet

 Attended the Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship

 Moved to New York City to study sculpture and photography

 Joined the Merchant Marine during WWII and married Fanny

McConnell
 At the Time

 Rampant racism

 Booker T. Washington

 Ku Klux Klan – 4 million members

 Anti-immigration movements nation-wide

 Race riots

 Lynchings
 Booker T. Washington

 Early civil rights leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries

 Was an inspirational figure for the Invisible Man – he

founded the Tuskegee Institute
 Helped blacks achieve higher education and financial
prominence
 After the Novel

 Martin Luther King Jr.

 Montgomery Bus Boycott – Rosa Parks

 Little Rock 5 – Eisenhower sent in the National Guard

 Ku Klux Klan still in existence

 Martin Luther King Jr.

 One of the greatest civil rights leaders in history

 Organized large civil rights protests and marches at

which he delivered inspiring speeches
 Led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on
Washington
 Freedom Riders

 After the Montgomery bus boycott had concluded,

college students from all over the country traveled to the
South where they rode the “desegregated” buses.
 Tested the court case Boynton v. Virginia, which
desegregated public institutions in the South
 Many were victims of violent outbreaks
 News Article

 “Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family”

 CNN
 Excerpt

 The mob was already waiting for James Zwerg by the

time the Greyhound bus eased into the station in
Montgomery, Alabama. Looking out the window, Zwerg
could see men gripping baseball bats, chains and clubs.
They had sealed off the streets leading to the bus station
and chased away news photographers. They didn't want
anyone to witness what they were about to do.
 Continued

 Zwerg accepted his worst fear: He was going to die today.

Only the night before, Zwerg had prayed for the strength
to not strike back in anger. He was among the 18 white
and black college students from Nashville who had
decided to take the bus trip through the segregated South
in 1961. They called themselves Freedom Riders. Their
goal was to desegregate public transportation.
 Continued

 Zwerg had not planned to go, but the night before, some
students had asked him to join them. To summon his
courage, Zwerg stayed up late, reading Psalm 27, the
scripture that the students had picked to read during a
group prayer before their trip. "The Lord is my light and
my salvation, of whom shall I fear?" the Psalm began. But
there was another passage at the end that touched Zwerg
in a place the other students didn't know about: "Though
my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will receive
me.”
 Continued

 Zwerg's parents had forsaken him for joining the civil

rights movement. That same night, he had written a letter
that was to be handed to them in case he was killed. It
explained his decision to join the Freedom Riders.
 Analysis

 This article exemplifies the impact that racism had and still has on
individuals who attempted to take action against this atrocity. This
article tells the specific story of Zwerg who was a member of the
Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement in 1961. Freedom
riders took trips to the South in order to test and enforce the
desegregation of public transportation. As you can see, many of these
individuals faced waiting mobs as they put their lives on the line each
day. Although Zwerg was not necessarily an African-American
individual, he still worked hard to provide them with the rights they
deserved, and, in the process, faced a number of obstacles similar to
those of the “Invisible Man.”
Illustration
Illustration Continued
Illustration Continued
Illustration Continued
 Passages

 “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted

Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I
might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand,
simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you
see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been
surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach
me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me…And,
alas, it’s seldom successful.”

- Prologue
 Passages Continued

 “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been

slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one
time been ashamed…Learn it to the younguns he
whispered fiercely; then he died.”

- Chapter One
 Passages Continued

 “There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings

are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that
area that his will is pulled in several directions at the
same time. You might sneer at this, but I know now. I was
pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember.
And my problem was that I always tried to go in
everyone’s way but my own…I am an invisible man.”

- Epilogue
 Question

 To what extent and in what forms, if any, does racism still

exist today, and how has it changed from that of the early
twentieth century?