Ralph Ellison
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Invisible Man Gets A Little More Invisible
The Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia reports that Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has been banned from school libraries and reading lists in Randolph County, North Carolina. After a parent decried the book as “not so innocent,” the school board voted 5–2…
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Happy Birthday, Ralph Ellison!
Happy birthday to Ralph Ellison, who would have turned 99 today. His fiction was revelatory—Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953—as were his essays on literature, music, and race. You can read a 1977 interview with him here.
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Harlem Blues
Between 1915 and 1970, six million African-Americans left the oppression of the Jim Crow South to find freedom in California and the northern states. Most traveled by rail, with those in the Southeast taking the Seaboard Air Line up the…
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The Political is the Personal
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new memoir about life in the Socialist Workers Party shows the effects of political idealism on a child’s upbringing