"I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” -- author Ralph Ellison, from his landmark novel "Invisible Man" (1952). Ellison, who passed away on April 16, 1994, received the National Book Award for the novel which is a journal of an African-American man's search for his identity in a segregated society.
There are many in our nation to whom Ellison would be invisible today, by refusing to see him and acknowledge his humanity. It's proven every day by those same people with attacks on voting rights and on what's taught in schools and read in libraries.
(photo: Ellison in 1957. James Whitmore/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)
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