Ralph Ellison Essay

"I am a novelist not an activist," he says, "but I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap."

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on March 1, 1914.   . His father, Lewis Ellison, was an adventurous and accomplished man who had served in the military overseas and then lived in Oklahoma City and worked in construction.   He started his own ice and coal business.   Ellison"s mother, Ida Millsap Ellison, was a political activist who campaigned for the Socialist Party and was arrested several times for violating the segregation orders. At the time of Ellison"s birth, Oklahoma had not been a state very long and was still considered a part of the frontier. Lewis and Ida had each grown up in the South to parents who were slaves.   When they married, they moved out west to Oklahoma, hoping the lives of their children would be better in this state, reputed for its freedom.   It wasn"t long, however, before the prejudices of Texas and Arkansas soon fell upon Oklahoma.  
After her husband"s death in 1917, Ida supported Ralph and his younger brother, Herbert by working as a domestic at the Avery Chapel Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church.   The family moved into the parsonage and Ellison was exposed to the minister"s library.   Literature was a destined medium for Ellison, whose father named him after the famous American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson and hoped that Ellison too would be a poet. His enthusiasm for reading was encouraged by his mother who brought home many books and magazines from houses she cleaned.   When a black Episcopal priest in the city challenged the white custom of barring blacks from the public library and got this custom overturned, this...