An Integrative Vernacular

Abstract

Published in the American Scholar in 1978, Ellison’s “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” is a longer version of a commencement address he gave to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1975, titled “The Little Man Behind the Stove.” Given the publication date of Ellison’s essay it would make sense that terms, concepts and, especially in the little man himself, aesthetic figurations related to integration would feature prominently. With the destruction of Jim Crow the civil rights movement had ended centuries of segregation and pushed the USA into an age of social integration. It is important to think about the integrative message of “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” not only as a product of Brown vs. Board of Education but also of more immediate events. Ellison’s remarks come a little more than a decade after Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act and Executive Order 11246 in 1965, as well as Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971. Abolishing the legal grounds for separate but equal institutions however led to what Orlando Patterson has called the “paradoxes of integration” (15). While the federal government continued to pass legislation dismantling the legal legacy of Jim Crow, Patterson discovers that the same post-Brown vs. Board decades saw an increase in racial chauvinism (65).

But diversity is the correct word, let man be made of many parts, and you’ll have no Hitler states. Why, if you follow this integration business they’ll end up forcing me, an invisible man, to become white …

-Undated draft of Invisible Man¹

In this effort we are often less interested in what we are than in projecting what we will be. But in our freewheeling appropriation of culture we appear to act on the assumption that as members of a “nation of nations,” we are, by definition and by the process of democratic cultural integration, the inheritors, creators and creations of a culture of cultures.

-Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”