Abstract: On April 6, 1970—almost two years to the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray on the second floor of a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel on April 4, 1968—Ralph Waldo Ellison told Time magazine readers what his work had been trying to say since the publication of his first novel, Invisible Man (1952): achieving American democracy had tragic costs. Ellison’s essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” was part of Time’s special issue titled “Black America 1970.” The opening lines declared, “[t]he fantasy of an America free of blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society. While we are aware that there is something inescapably tragic about the cost of achieving our democratic ideals, we keep such tragic awareness segregated in the rear of our minds. We allow it to come to the fore only during moments of national crisis.”1 “America” and “democracy” were the last two words many Time readers wanted to hear. King’s assassination confirmed for black peo-ple that white America was morally bankrupt and irredeemable, pro-viding retroactive justification for the race riots that took place in 1960s Watts, Newark and Detroit. A growing mood of black pessimism fueled the Black Panther Party, whose founding promise of selfdefense in 1966 seemed indispensible to many, including Baldwin, by the early 1970s. A public opinion poll in the same Time issue confirmed this: 31 percent of African Americans polled in 1970, compared to 22 percent in 1963, thought that violence might be an effective tool for securing black civil rights.2
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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