In the epilogue to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, the protagonist, the eponymous invisible man, explains the paradox that his story dramatizes. By the novel's end, he finds himself critical of mainstream white America as well as the black activists who rail against it. To the question of how and why he writes about his experiences, he responds, “I denounce and defend . . . I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. . . . I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. . . . So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love” (579–80). Any attempt to simplify his pronouncement is necessarily reductive, but what he denounces, defends, hates, and loves is in large part the idea that he, a black man, is a free and full participant in the United States of America. He denounces it because oppression, discrimination, and brutality all prove it to be untrue. He defends it because perhaps it can be made true. He hates the idea because its assertion and untruth make it painful—so painful that he is driven “to the point of invisibility.” He loves it because its realization would represent justice long sought.

As the politics of racial justice have come to the fore in 2020 and its aftermath, with the killing of George Floyd and the wide-ranging resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is time to revisit the racial politics of the twentieth century—and the resonances of the deeper past that inhabit them. In order to consider the movement's potential for success and the strategies that might achieve it, this essay takes its cue from Invisible Man's nonchronological approach and will consider together the medieval past to which the novel refers; the Harlem uprisings of 1935 and 1943, which are integral sources for the novel; and those uprisings’ implications for racial justice in 2020 and beyond. Despite the claim of Ellison's protagonist that “outside the [black radical] Brotherhoood we were outside history,” there is no stepping outside history (499). Scholarly assertions that the protagonist posits the transcendence of history as necessary to self-possession and that the novel's Rinehart, a hard-to-pin-down yet influential character “who dresses in the newest fashions and plays a role that suits everyone he meets” (Nyikos), signifies those who would “transcend—step outside of—History” nonetheless conclude that “one can never act and/or write outside of one's history” (Neighbors 231, 230).Footnote ¹ The novel tells its readers as much and hurls them back beyond the United States and the Americas, beyond the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, and into premodernity. When, in the epilogue, the protagonist returns to his grandfather's deathbed advice to “overcome ’em with yeses [and] agree ’em to death and destruction” (16), he asks, “Did he mean to affirm the principle [on which the country was built], which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds?” (574). At once, the novel registers the United States’ foundational focus on freedom and simultaneous reliance on slavery and racism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the black struggle for recognition and equal rights. It also registers the discourse of freedom's roots in the premodern past. The events of the novel and a modernity characterized by racial ideology are not outside history. Instead, the medieval past—whose influence on modernity has been too rarely recognized—inheres within them.Footnote ² Examining how Invisible Man negotiates the Middle Ages’ presence and influence offers insights into how the struggle for black lives might proceed.Footnote ³

When, toward the end of the novel, the radical activist Ras the Exhorter is restyled as Ras the Destroyer, it becomes evident just how important the Middle Ages are to the novel's handling of temporality and identity. Ras seems to “define himself in opposition to the white culture,” to embody the idea that “the only distinction that matters is the difference between black and white,” but the distinction fails (Nyikos). Ras dons a sort of warrior's pastiche that evokes violence and conflict in three contexts—African history, the history of the American West, and the history of medieval Europe: “dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain; a fur cap upon his head, his arm bearing a shield, a cape made of the skin of some wild animal around his shoulders. A figure more out of a dream than Harlem . . .” (556). According to onlookers, Ras yells “something in African or West Indian or something” (563). Evoking his Americanness, he rides a large black horse, and “he got him a cowboy saddle and some big spurs” (562). Most of Ras's accoutrements evoke the Pan-Africanism of the early twentieth century and the masculinist ideal of the American West. The pair of contexts is fitting for this black American radical agitator. But there, in their midst, appear the European Middle Ages. The same onlookers have the following exchange:

While the spear evokes forms of warfare traditional on the African continent, it also evokes the lances of medieval chivalric knights. This is especially true when it is paired with the spiked shield—that is, a targe. This shield, common in medieval European warfare, is the same kind to which Chaucer famously compares the Wife of Bath's hat in the Canterbury Tales (General Prologue 1.470–71). Far from occupying a position outside history, Ras's pastiche conveys just how deeply entangled the novel, blackness, and racial justice are with history, African and European alike. What's more, they evoke the medievalism that appears in an important strain of Harlem Renaissance thought: I have shown elsewhere the Middle Ages’ importance to the work of writers, including Jessie Redmon Fauset, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke (Whitaker, “B(l)ack Home” and “Middle Ages”).

Though published in the 1950s, Invisible Man is also a product of the Harlem Renaissance, that “flowering,” to use James Weldon Johnson's term, of black American literature, art, and thought that defined the 1920s and 1930s (qtd. in Levy 308). The novel reaches its climax in a Harlem street protest modeled on the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. The 1935 riot has been considered the first modern race riot because participants took their anger out on property. This was a departure from the interpersonal violence between roving bands of black and white combatants that characterized previous urban race riots (Grimshaw, “Harlem Disturbances”). The 1935 riot has also been taken as marking the end of the Harlem Renaissance, with its optimism and progress, and as evidence of the movement's failure (Stewart). Ellison's protagonist ends the novel in the sewers, underground, with no interest in coming up, and his journey, too, looks like a failure. Yet, since “here, at least, [he] could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet,” he doesn't see it that way. It is only once underground that he can speak clearly about his mixed motivations: denouncing, defending, hating, and loving. The reader is left to question whether the journey has been a failure or a success.

2020 left many wondering the same thing about efforts to achieve racial justice over the past century—from the Harlem Renaissance through civil rights through political correctness, the rise of diversity and equity administration as a profession and organizational imperative, and even the election of the first black president of the United States. Many black Americans responded to the widely viewed video of the police murder of George Floyd with utter exhaustion (Carr). As the Black Lives Matter movement surged and increased its impact over its 2014 iteration in response to the killing of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, it became a common practice to “say their names” in order to honor those killed by racially motivated police brutality, and then to point out that the number of victims is far too large to list all their names. At the same time, signs of real progress abound. Protests, large and small, continue, especially when yet another black American is killed by police. Organizations that have never before sought training in antiracism are filling the dance cards of consultants like me who offer it. Antiracist training so rankled the Trump White House that it banned such trainings for federal agencies and contractors (Vought 1–2). The ban indicates that such work has been successful in helping to make people aware of the lasting effects of racial oppression and how they might be mitigated. Whether the movement for racial justice has met with failure or success remains as much an open question now as it does at the beginning and end of Invisible Man, and as it did after the Harlem riots.

Invisible Man's success in capturing “the subjective flavor of rioting . . . that sweeps contagiously through the streets” suggests that the novel, like the historical Harlem riot, offers insights into the causes and outcomes of protest that have implications for the current moment (Grimshaw, “Harlem Disturbances” 118). Initially, the 1935 Harlem riot's causes and repercussions were too quickly and narrowly defined. In the middle of the Great Depression, a lack of job opportunities and a sense of hopelessness were prominent in Harlem and black America more generally (Greenberg 398–99, 402–05). Two days after the riot, a New York Times article suggested the Depression was to blame when it described Harlem's blacks as “resentful” and “restless” (“Police” 1, 16; my emphasis). The same article reports that black luminaries, led by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had already issued a statement that the “basic cause is economic maladjustment: segregating and discrimination against Negroes in the matter of employment” (“Police” 16). These claims came hard on the heels of the riot, but there remained sufficient doubt about the uprising's causes that Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's office formed the investigative Commission on Conditions in Harlem. The investigators included prominent black men, including A. Philip Randolph and Countee Cullen, and its research was headed by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The commission's report, after months of investigation and public hearings, seems on its surface to corroborate analysts’ initial claims that unemployment was the cause.

The report, however, barely conceals that there was another cause behind the riot, one that presages the catalyst of the Black Lives Matter movement. The public hearings reveal that frustration with racist police brutality was a major impetus behind the uprising. Attendees conveyed “the pent-up resentment of the people . . . most forcibly in regard to the police.” The report cites “the constant threat that the police had offered to [black Harlemites’] peace, security, and very existence” (Mayor's Commission 16). Since its professionalization in American cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century, policing has had clear ties to big-business interests. Indeed, in 1935 African American organizations had been picketing in front of white-owned businesses to protest against racial discrimination in hiring. When white business owners won an injunction against the protests, police were hired to enforce it (Ford). As Cheryl Greenberg has shown, once efforts such as the picketing and the “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaign failed or were defeated by counterefforts such as the injunction (416), rioting became “politics by other means” (397). In other words, high unemployment due to racial discrimination, mixed with black citizens’ lack of access to New Deal ameliorations, were closely connected to racist policing practices. The commission's report offers a hierarchy of problems in which discrimination in employment is primary and policing is important but subordinate. Yet, the report struggles to maintain the hierarchy.

A component of successful protest is the paradoxical pairing of destruction with constructive aims. Ellison's protagonist is able to see his predicament most clearly and to speak of it most analytically once his former life is destroyed: his life as a key member of the activist Brotherhood, his faith in the organization's leaders and goals, his faith in his relationships, his faith in his own ingenuity to navigate the world as a visible man—all are gone. He only achieves clear-eyed analysis after Harlem is burnt out and looted. When the old structures are razed, his slate is wiped clean and there is room to build something new. In foregrounding unemployment, the 1935 commission recognized and capitalized on the Depression's economic destabilization. With the United States economy in its sixth year of dire straits, employment was an area where old structures had already been weakened or destroyed and new, more equitable structures might be erected in their places. Alain Locke, the black philosopher who held great influence over the Harlem Renaissance and was known as the movement's “dean,” underscores the point in 1936 when he writes that the riot “served a diagnostic purpose which, if heeded and turned into a program of constructive civic reform, will give us improvement and progress instead of revolution and anarchy” (495).

The lessons of 1935 about constructive civic reform speak to the success of 2020's movement. The pairing of destruction with constructive aims was on full display. To protect the image of the daytime protests, movement leaders quickly disavowed nighttime looting and dramatic damage to storefronts and buildings. Others chalked up rioting and looting to self-serving opportunists. Black Lives Matter protestors confronted vandals whom they judged to be unaffiliated with protests, even as those would-be vandals painted “Black Lives Matter” on buildings. Fears of property and economic damage threatened to leave the movement devoid of a clear message. Yet, when the call to defund the police emerged it was strong enough to supersede these much less compelling causes for and effects of the protests. The cacophony of competing analyses, attributing the protests variably to opportunism or aimless vandalism, amounted to a kind of rhetorical destruction that had cleared the field for the movement's clarion call to end racist policing practices. The destruction, material and rhetorical, meant that the movement's cohesive and arresting message could be heard clearly. The potential for the kind of “constructive civic reform” Locke called for has become available.

The Harlem riot's outcomes instruct today's activists to proceed cautiously. After 1935, some constructive reforms occurred, but they were incomplete, and racism's entrenchment meant that they were not sustained. In response to the commission's findings, government services in Harlem were improved. The Emergency Relief Bureau raised the number of blacks in “responsible positions” and corrected racially based wage disparities among its ranks. The Works Progress Administration in New York followed suit. Health care and access to education were expanded. The commission's report made much of the exclusion of black New Yorkers from jobs in the public utilities. In the ensuing years, blacks were hired into such positions (Greenberg 418–19). As the United States entered the economic boom of World War II, however, black Americans were left behind once again. Black Harlemites still found it hard to obtain skilled and white-collar work, and when the Works Progress Administration shut down in 1943—several months before Harlem would erupt into riot again—the Department of Welfare's commissioner, William Hodson, pointed out that those who remained in need of government services included “a considerable number of employable Negroes and aliens who find it . . . difficult to obtain employment” (qtd. in Greenberg 421). Ameliorations after 1935 did not penetrate to the roots of racial disparity. If culture is a construction site, it had not been cleared thoroughly enough to erect the new and lasting antiracist structures Locke envisioned.

The most salient lesson of 1935 for this post-2020 moment is to be found in what ameliorations were not attempted. The commission's report called for a citizens’ public safety committee to be made up of five to seven Harlemites, black and white, with which citizens could lodge complaints about police mistreatment. A civilian committee would alleviate fears of, and prevent opportunities for, police retribution against complainants. The New York Police Department contended that “an independent monitoring agency would undermine law enforcement . . . and citizens should play no role” (Taylor 85). And La Guardia completely ignored the commission's recommendation, even as his administration took progressive steps in the realms of jobs, education, and health care. After the 1943 riots, black community leaders did not advocate for a citizens’ committee. Some even praised the police. Clarence Taylor has attributed the lack of antagonism to a wartime focus on national unity (87–88). It likely also had to do with the hope of revivifying the cooperation black Harlem had received from the mayor's office after 1935. Greenberg has argued that black leaders often go along with the so-called riffraff theory, that rioters are marginal and not respectable or central members of the community, because “individuals seeking cooperation from the power structure to further their goals were unlikely to jeopardize their success . . .” (408).Footnote ⁴ In response to the 1943 riot, a similar dynamic holds: if cooperative efforts have been successful before, then individuals seeking new cooperation from the power structure would be wise to present their community as grateful and flexible. This approach makes sense when an oversight committee is meant to handle police brutality that is a secondary, if integral, problem. Cooperation in other matters—unemployment, health care, education—takes precedence. But what of our own day, when the police killing of unarmed black people is instead recognized as a primary problem?

Surely, the fate of the citizens’ public safety committee suggests that cooperation with the authorities on their terms will not work. Ellison's novel presents another approach: demanding that the authorities cooperate on the terms of the oppressed. In the prologue, the invisible man reveals that he steals electricity by means of a tapped power line. He has wired his subbasement hovel with 1,369 lights, and he also uses power to run his phonograph. He plans to cover his walls and floor with more lights, and to own five phonographs. His efforts are recuperative: he feels his “vital aliveness” while he gets back at Monopolated Light & Power “for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself” (7–8). The novel's use of electricity is more than mere revenge: Johnnie Wilcox identifies it as “a media interface that can . . . be used to assemble a network of subalterns . . .” (987). When the creation of this network is mastered by the black male protagonist, it offers “a counternarrative to historical representations which restrict technological proficiency to white males” (988). In other words, electricity is a metaphor for other forms of power—social, legal, economic. The protagonist has amassed power unto himself, and he plans to take even more of it. He leaves the world's authorities no choice but to cooperate with him, because they do not know how or to what extent they are doing so. Networks, the text suggests, can be used to rearrange the power dynamics inherent in antiblack racism.

The networks that represent the manipulation of power in the novel are not limited to electricity. Ras's targe evokes medieval approaches to time and space that confound modern Western linear chronology. Chaucer's elegiac “Anelida and Arcite” offers an illuminating example. In it, Anelida, queen of Armenia, is a jilted lover mourning love lost in a Thebes that naively teeters on the edge of annihilation. The main character's complaint begins and ends with the refrain that the “swerde of sorowe” (“sword of sorrow” [line 212]) “so thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce” (“so pierces with the point of memory” [211]) and that Anelida has been so “thirled” (350; my trans.). Anelida is trapped in a cycle of memory and mourning such that she, like the city Chaucer depicts as vibrant and alive right before its legendary fall, is “always dying but never dead” (Patterson 657). Both are always and interminably inhabiting the predetermined act of falling—Anelida in an ill-fated love, Thebes to a merciless enemy. Memory pins her, as if by the point and blade of a sword, to one spot. Around and around she is destined to spin. Such is the point of elegy, and, though Invisible Man is not an elegy per se, the protagonist's journey contains elements of the genre: his hopes of finding “my true family! My true people! My true country!” are kindled and dashed (346); his retreat underground is like death, and the life he makes there is like rebirth. So much of that underground life is in the service of analyzing and making up for the life he previously lived. He, too, is pinned by memory and spinning.

Medieval approaches to geography even more spectacularly offer the novel alternatives to modern spatial and chronological linearity. Bartholomeus Anglicus in his thirteenth-century encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) takes up the “musicam harmoniam” (“musical harmony” [369; my trans.]) that attends the balance between binary oppositions in nature, including in humans. He writes that men in Africa have humors burnt and wasted by the sun that lead to their being black and “animo defectiores” (“cowardes of herte” [648; Trevisa 2: 752]). By contrast, men of the north due to coldness are white, and because they retain their humors, which are not evaporated by sun and heat, they are “plus audaces” (“bolde and hardy” [648; 753]). For Bartholomeus, nature is characterized by the unity of diversity. And in the wildly popular fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville, also known as Mandeville's Travels, the protagonist travels around the entire world only to misrecognize his home when he reaches it (Seymour). The text's traveler is so “sufficiently othered, ‘worlded’ or dialogized by his travels around the globe, as to misapprehend himself” (Khanmohamadi 140). He gets home but continues to perceive it as a strange place because the far reaches of the world have exerted as much influence on him as he has on the world and his others. In medieval thought, the world is experienced through the malleability and nonlinearity of space and time. Invisible Man registers a similar episteme.

Ras's round targe suggests that things come full circle—in racial power dynamics and in time. The protagonist's purloining of power bears out recuperative resolution, but the targe also suggests for the novel a 360-degree temporality. In addition to the past, the text engages futurity. If denouncing and defending and hating and loving is an effective strategy for self-realization, then the text's circularity suggests that those of us readers who, like Ellison's protagonist, would resist the hegemonic power structures of racial ideology can demand that the authorities cooperate with us. Perhaps we witnessed the beginnings of such a dynamic in 2020. In June, protestors burned police cars in Center City, Philadelphia, directly in front of City Hall. The police stood back and did nothing to stop them.Footnote ⁵ In the same city, in May 1985, the police department dropped bombs on the row house headquarters of the black anarcho-primitivist organization MOVE and destroyed an entire city block, displacing hundreds of residents. Six adults and five children were killed (McCrystal). In 2020 the police's nonconfrontational response to attacks on police property signaled a sea change. This was by no means a citywide approach, of course. During the same week, similar protests broke out along a major commercial street in far blacker, and less readily televised, West Philadelphia. Police used much more aggressive tactics, including lobbing tear-gas canisters indiscriminately into occupied residential neighborhoods (Whelan et al.). Still, the police nonreaction at City Hall, along with similar nonreaction to widespread destruction nearby in the city's most exclusive shopping district, demonstrates movement toward something like the authorities’ acquiescence to the invisible man. Photographic evidence of the aftermath reveals just how thoroughly exclusive, high-end shops were broken into and looted (Alvarez; Inquirer Staff Photographers). Ras's targe, evoking a transtemporal approach that follows medieval thought in resisting linearity, shows that the expected hierarchy of power can be turned on its head.

Invisible Man illuminates the conundrum in which the Black Lives Matter movement finds itself. In the book's prologue, the protagonist experiences a vision of an enslaved black woman who loves her master because he gave her several sons: “because I loved my sons I learned to love their father though I hated him too” (10). Her sons hate him and want to tear him to pieces, so she defends him by poisoning him. He dies a better death than he would have at her sons’ hands. She denounces, defends, hates, and loves. The protagonist introduces the question of whether freedom lies in hating or in loving. The answer, it seems, is in both. If today's movement is to be successful in reducing the frequency of police killings of black Americans, it will bear out the very real value in denouncing racist law enforcement practices in order to defend the concept of liberty and justice for all, and the necessity of hating the racist corruption of the American ideal of freedom in order to love into existence a “more perfect union.” When Invisible Man invokes feudalism, African and European military methods, and an elegiac nonlinear temporality, the Middle Ages offer an epistemological off-ramp from the strict hierarchies, spatial and temporal, that inform a modernity defined by racial ideology. After denouncing, defending, hating, and loving, those of us who have become invisible, who have in at least some aspects of our lives gone underground in order to have some peace, will perhaps be able to rise again. In the words of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1928 novel Dark Princess and his 1903 Souls of Black Folk, it is a “fine and human hope” that we will finally be fully black and fully American at once (Dark Princess 23; Souls 9).