Just came across a letter by Ralph Ellison responding to William Faulkner's defense of a moderate, gradualist approach to Brown v. Board of Education. Though Faulkner claimed to support integration, he cautioned African Americans against moving too quickly, most notably in a Life magazine article in 1956. Ellison fired back, "Faulkner has delusions of grandeur because he really believes that he invented these characteristics which he ascribes to Negroes in his fiction and now he thinks he can end this great historical action just as he ends a dramatic action in one of his novels ... Nuts! [W]e're trying hard as hell to free ourselves; thoroughly and completely, so that when we get the crackers off our back we can discover what we really are and what we really wish to preserve out of the experience that made us." Though criticized by black authors like Richard Wright for not being sufficiently militant, Ellison's letter[s] reveal a more defiant side, and also a legal one. After rejecting Faulkner, he notes that civil rights lawyers like Thurgood Marshall had "turned the Supreme Court into the forum of liberty it was intended to be, and the Constitution of the United States into a briarpatch in which the nimble people, the willing people, have a chance." Robert Penn Warren had used the symbol of the briarpatch to describe segregation in an infamous 1929 essay, now Ellison reappropriated it, using it as a reference to the Constitution itself. Could this be a new way to think about the document?
Thanks so much for finding this, Anders. What a (typically, for Ellison) remarkable little essay.
Posted by: Vladimir | February 24, 2011 at 01:14 PM