Exalting Ellison @exaltingellison - Tumblr Blog

Black World, December 1970.

The now-defunct magazine dedicated this particular issue to Ellison and his body of work. Just came in the mail.

One ironic witness to the beauty and universality of art is the fact that the descendants of the very men who enslaved us can now sing the spirituals and find in the singing an exaltation of their own humanity.

Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview”, The Paris Review (1955)

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For the art —the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom.

Ralph Ellison, From The New York Review, February 6, 1964

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Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (via quotespile)

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My language. My language is broken. My language is hurt. My language is forgotten. My culture. My culture was ridiculed. My culture was stolen. My culture was banned. My religion. My religion is misinterpreted. My religion is laughed at. My religion is feared. My religion is hated. Me. I’m laughed at. I’m suspected. I’m hated. And you? You enjoy Your privilege Don’t fear for your life Or your sons And you dare telling me how to feel about that? #whiteprivilege

-Delafil, Privilege (via falastinianheart)

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Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

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He was shot for a simple mistake of judgment and he bled and his blood dried and shortly the crowd trampled out the stains. It was a normal mistake of which many are guilty: He thought he was a man and that men were not meant to be pushed around.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (via exaltingellison)

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Materially, psychologically and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, between our assertions and our actions. Without the black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has always threatened its existence from within.

Ralph Ellison, What America Would Be Like Without Blacks (1970)