In Defense Of Mean Black Lit Grandpa

Review: Juneteenth and Three Days Before The Shooting, by Ralph Ellison.

A year before he died and more than five before Juneteenth, his posthumous novel, was published, Ralph Ellison made his last televised appearance on PBS. It was part of a town hall on black power, moderated by Charlene Hunter Gault, with him, John Edgar Wideman, Stanley Crouch, Elaine Brown, Derrick Bell, and Kwame “Stokely Carmichael” Toure. The panel wasn’t completely hostile to his presence: Wideman was quite complimentary, and Crouch was behaved( which was an accomplishment for him). Yet the discussion couldn’t escape a general emotionalist antipathy toward Ellison’s refined definition of a true multicultural evolution within the democratic process. Whether it was supposed to be him not sticking it to the radicals enough( Crouch) or him being not bending to marxist whims( Toure), Ellison lingered there like everyone’s pariah, too much and not enough for any of the parochial sides in the room.

Ran on the Macneil Lehrer news hour and edited to look a little more genial: Ralph’s clip here( at 8:31 in Black Power: A Discussion on the Condition of the Black Community), still shows an artist tired out of his head. He had spent the previous two decades with little interest in being “Ralph Ellison: Canonical literary man” anymore. In the 70s, he had turned off neo-conservative critics by…