Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4
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"Oh, man, I'm nowhere": Ralph Ellison and the Psychospatial Terrain of Mid-Century Harlem / Walter Bosse
Abstract
This article explores the theoretical contours of Ralph Ellison's 1948 essay, "Harlem Is Nowhere." I argue that Ellison's text theorizes space in a way that enables resistance against the geopolitical constraints of urban black modernity. In his essay, Ellison explores the underground halls of the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem - "the only center in the city wherein both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care" (Ellison 295). His study thus situates racial politics within a specific institutional milieu. At Lafargue, Ellison works as a kind of ethnographer, and records that the utterance "I'm nowhere" was commonly used by patients as an answer to the simple question, "How are you?" Of course, this response articulates the emotional and psychological severity of life in Harlem at midcentury, but it does so in fascinating and complex ways. The phrase "I'm nowhere" not only acknowledges the constraints working against an individual's subjectivity, it also shows the respondent taking hermeneutical control over the terms of her or his existence. The respondent actively construes an ontological question and, in turn, gives it geographical and phenomenological consideration. He communicates a personal condition in expressly spatial terms. Further, by embracing "nowhere" as a category of lived experience, the Harlemites circumvent the center/periphery binary that perpetuates social marginality; they thereby construct an alternative space filled with potential. The concept of being "nowhere" provides a new way of articulating displacement as a central moment in the history of the black Atlantic, and the function of "nowhere" as a potentially liberating signifier provides a unique opportunity to view the black vernacular through the lens of spatial theory.
Keywords Place & Space; Race & Ethnicity; Urban Studies
<1> In 1946, the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic opened in Harlem. Staffed by both black and white volunteers, the clinic was headed by Doctors Hilde Mosse and Frederic Wertham, socially motivated practitioners committed to providing psychotherapy to the underprivileged, regardless of race. The first integrated institution of its kind, the clinic's mission derived from the emergent field of practical social psychiatry; Wertham and Mosse saw in the slum-like conditions of post-war Harlem an urban space especially antagonistic to the psychological health of the city's residents (Doyle "Where," 752). [1] Upon its opening, left-leaning thinkers based in New York City championed the clinic's cause. Among them was Ralph Ellison, who in 1948 wrote a profoundly significant piece detailing Lafargue's mission in Harlem, its service to the city's residents, and its impact on the broader cultural milieu. Ellison titled his essay "Harlem Is Nowhere." [2]
<2> In his recent and comprehensive biography on Ellison, Arnold Rampersad suggests that "Harlem Is Nowhere" - though unpublished until its inclusion in Shadow and Act (1964) - served a very practical purpose for Ellison's craft. Specifically, the essay allowed him to explore and develop ideas, themes, and motifs that he would return to in his most famous novel, Invisible Man (1952). Rampersad claims that "[n]o single task honed more sharply Ralph's ability to depict Invisible's experience in Harlem and New York City" (219). To be sure, there are palpable aesthetic traces of the essay within Invisible Man, and many of these traces can be observed in the novel's probing portrayal of the urban scene. Like the essay, the novel explores the cracks and crevices of Harlem, and its exposure of the city's literal and figurative underworlds constitutes a major component of Ellison's commentary on race. In what follows, however, I proceed from my contention that "Harlem Is Nowhere" deserves exclusive critical attention, because it voices radical sociopolitical arguments in its own right. In other words, the essay has significance beyond its utility as a warm up for Invisible Man.
<3> I argue that "Harlem Is Nowhere" deploys a radical theorization of space, and engages a politics of resistance that identifies and pushes against the constraints of urban black modernity. Navigating the subterranean halls of the Lafargue clinic, Ellison leads us through "the only center in the city wherein both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care" (295). He thus situates racial politics within a specific institution, where he writes in the manner of an ethnographer. Inside Lafargue, Ellison identifies that the phrase "I'm nowhere" was common amongst the patients. Offered as a response to the cordial question "How are you?", the phrase attempts to represent an overdetermined agency. The individual interprets a question of condition as a matter of place. The respondent actively reroutes an ontological query into the realms of geography and phenomenology: "How are you?" / "Oh, man, I'm nowhere" (297). In spite of the crushing desperation that the utterance appears to convey, it is nonetheless possible to see redemptive value in the words by viewing "nowhere" as a matter of strategic positionality. By claiming "nowhere" as a category of lived experience, the Harlemites circumvent the center/periphery binary that perpetuates social marginality. In doing so, they construct an alternative space filled with potential, and demonstrate "how fragmentation, ruptures, deviation, displacements, and discontinuities can be politically transformed from liability and weakness to a potential source of opportunity and strength" (Soja 117). In Ellison's study of Harlem and Lafargue, the concept of being "nowhere" provides a new way of articulating displacement as a central moment in the history of the black Atlantic.
<4> In many ways, the intellectual trajectory of "Harlem Is Nowhere" follows a logic familiar to specific threads within the fabric of postcolonial thought. Ellison illustrates a heightened awareness of geopolitics; he provides institutional contexts when discussing racial identity; and he ultimately critiques a national "democracy" that upholds segregation. All of this works toward an understanding of social marginality which is in tune with the likes of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, among others.
<5> Ellison's ethnographic work employs a spatial analysis to access the otherwise impenetrable universe of the ghetto, and the essay strives to empower those who inhabit that space. In "Harlem Is Nowhere," Ellison writes about institutional and geographical spaces in a way that unveils the power structures and sociopolitical contradictions that exist at their core. He explores the enunciation "I'm nowhere" as an expression that strategically circumvents the structures constraining urban black subjects. In this way, "Harlem Is Nowhere" identifies that an alternative and potentially revolutionary space might exist within the margins, and Ellison situates this potential for resistance squarely within the black vernacular.
I. Spaces of Contradiction
<6> Drawing heavily on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja establishes the ideological implications of physical and conceptual space: "Power is ontologically embedded in the center-periphery relation" (31). For Soja, "power - and the specifically cultural politics that arise from its workings - is contextualized and made concrete, like all social relations, in the (social) production of (social) space" (87). Such spatial constructions of power can oppress or enable, can sustain the political status quo or generate the possibility for resistance and emancipatory change. Indeed, "Harlem Is Nowhere" illustrates Ellison's prescient awareness of the complex constitution of power in its spatial forms. Much earlier than 1948, Harlem had achieved a fame that had transformed the locale into a highly racialized space; Harlem constituted both a material and a conceptual center that concentrated the phenomenal reality of black America in the twentieth century. The popular imagination conceived of Harlem as an urban locale marked by blackness. In a sense, the place had been conflated with a race. Thus, when Ellison claims that "Harlem Is Nowhere" in his title, he also suggests that there is a crisis in locating blackness in the US. Of course, this also points to the longer history of displacement that he writes about in the pages that follow. The seemingly cryptic title is thus highly strategic, in that it allows Ellison to lay bare the lived experience of the city's ghettoization, and at the same time recognize concrete potential in its marginality, its "nowhere"-ness.
<7> As critics and historians have noted time and time again, early-twentieth-century Harlem was a magnet for the socially, geographically, and politically displaced. From 1920 to 1930, its population increased from 84,000 to more than 200,000, becoming - as one historian puts it - "the biggest black city in the world" (Gill 282). To be sure, Harlem was not the only metropolis to experience such an influx. Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and many other locations sustained huge numbers as well; such numbers facilitated local "renaissances" in these other places, though the near-mythical stature of Harlem has tended to eclipse them. Of course, the uptick in cultural and artistic innovation was only one consequence of the unprecedented surge in numbers. Crime, violence, poverty, and all manner of social exploitations proceeded from the mounting urban congestion. The economic, political, and racial histories specific to Harlem are incredibly complex, as evidenced by the veritable and multidisciplinary industry of scholarship that continues to unpack the city's cultural baggage. In "Harlem Is Nowhere," Ellison too wrestles with this complexity. In just a few pages, he telescopes into view the long histories and aftermaths of the Great Migration, Great Depression, and Second World War, and he localizes his study to show the African-American Mecca as addled by racism, riots, poor health, and addiction (Gill 334). [3]
<8> Focusing its racial and cultural analysis in the basement spaces of the Lafargue Clinic, "Harlem Is Nowhere" achieves a depth that accomplishes far more than journalistic reportage on the city's state of affairs. As its later rejection by Harper's suggests, which "thought it too impressionistic," the essay observes a stylistic and philosophical complexity that may have seemed overwrought to the editors there (Rampersad 222). Lawrence Jackson rightly points out that "Ellison thought of black life as a maze," and the essay develops this Kafkaesque metaphor to describe the physical and psychological constitution of the city in the late 1940s (373).
<9> The reader gets a sense of this from the start, as Ellison invokes the mythical descent of Orpheus or perhaps Dante, guiding his readers below St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church on 215 West 133rd Street, the home of the Lafargue Clinic (Doyle, "Where" 752). Ellison describes the process of entry: "One must descend to the basement and move along a confusing mazelike hall to reach it. Twice the passage seems to lead against a blank wall; then at last one enters the brightly lighted auditorium" (294). In Ellison's estimation, accessing the clinic is not for the faint of heart. The entryways are "confusing" and labyrinthine; illusory dead ends distort one's navigation; and the stark differentials in light further disorient the traveler. Yet Ellison carefully works with contrasts from the onset of the essay, as he counterbalances the oppressive, institutional ambience with the "friendly smiles and low-pitched voices of the expert workers" (294). He proceeds to describe the clinic as "one of Harlem's most important institutions" (295). Ellison touts its value as a clinic that advocates for mental health, and he champions its sociopolitical mission as a racially integrated facility. He calls it "an underground extension of democracy" (295).
<10> Ellison thus begins by establishing Lafargue as a unique space within Harlem and, by extension, within the larger context of the US. Indeed, he uses this initial discussion of the racially integrated clinic as a kind of spatial counterpoint to the surrounding geopolitical landscapes. As "an underground extension of democracy," the interracial space of Lafargue allows Ellison to leverage his primary argument, which is that institutional segregation perpetuates a pervasive racism, which in turn compromises the psychology of all black Americans. In short, a national "democracy" that adheres to segregation is no democracy at all. The essay illustrates that this glaring political contradiction had wrought untold injury upon the mental constitution of African Americans, who experienced "perpetual alienation in the land of [their] birth":
Hence the most surreal fantasies are acted out upon the streets of Harlem; a man ducks in and out of traffic shouting and throwing imaginary grenades that actually exploded during World War I; a boy participates in the rape-robbery of his mother; a man beating his wife in a park uses boxing 'science' and observes Marquess of Queensberry rules (no rabbit punching, no blows beneath the belt). (Ellison 296-97)
This observational montage of insane and obscene acts intends to characterize Harlem's day-to-day activity in the late 1940s. The residents' chaotic, irrational, and illegal behavior plays out on the city's streets in broad daylight, and Ellison explicitly faults the prevailing political contradiction by which the State professes democracy while at the same time sustaining inequality: "Not quite citizens and yet Americans, full of the tensions of modern man but regarded as primitives, Negro Americans are in desperate search for identity" (297). He sets up the initial relation between the clinic and Harlem-at-large to explore the ideological dimensions of space, showing the conflicted psychology of the urban black subject to be a direct upshot of his physical surroundings and the power relations inscribed there.
<11> Thus, the discrete and subterranean space of the Lafargue clinic can be seen in Ellison's essay to constitute what Soja calls a "real-and-imagined place" (11). In Ellison's description of it, the clinic proactively redresses the racial dualism between white and black, as well as the homologous spatial dualism between center and periphery, "but extends well beyond them in scope, substance, and meaning" (Soja 11). The Lafargue ethos not only imagines but also puts into practice a sociopolitical paradigm that overcomes the rigid and politicized dichotomies that hold sway outside its walls.
<12> Critic Shelly Eversley discusses Ellison's use of contradiction within his aesthetic project, which is exemplified in the above-quoted passage when he describes African Americans as both non-citizens and Americans, both modern and "regarded as primitive" (Ellison 297). Eversley links his vision to that of Richard Wright, and suggests that their work actively performs according to specific poststructuralist priorities:
Their epistemology engages contradiction and posits the interplay of terms deemed mutually exclusive: black and white, the universal and the particular, public and private, the political and the aesthetic. Their perspective . . . amounts to an assault on the cultural status quo . . . [A]s black men and as intellectuals, Ellison and Wright relish contradiction (455).
Concerned with the psychosocial character of the city space, Ellison considers contradiction as a defining feature of its residents, who occupy a liminal position between "urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities":
Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in the space of time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is possible literally for them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason-Dixon line. (296)
This concise description quickly concentrates deeply complex historical phenomena. Ellison stylistically condenses industrial developments and the subsequent migrations of human beings so as to convey the unprecedented forces - both temporal and geographical - that impact black consciousness. He goes on to explain the consequences of such an abrupt transition, maintaining that "the resulting clash of cultures within Negro personality account for some of the extreme contrasts found in Harlem, for both its negative and positive characteristics" (296, emphasis added). Again, building from conflict and contradiction, Ellison here exposes the instability of binary divisions, and opts instead for a "both/and" approach to cultural identity and analysis. It is within this approach that the social margins begin to exhibit their potential. As Ellison phrases it, "if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro's death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence" (296, emphasis added). In this formulation, we can see "the 'also' reverberating back to disrupt the categorical closures implicit in the either/or logic" (Soja 7); Ellison thus intervenes in the binary structure and opens it up to new possibilities.
<13> Indeed, Ellison does describe qualitative differences between the cultures of the rural South and the labyrinth of the urban ghetto. However, in doing so, he collapses the two terms into each other in order to expose the instability of a modern/primitive dichotomy. Metropolitan cultural activity plays side by side with human remnants from a distant southern geography:
Here it is possible for talented youths to leap through the development of decades in a brief twenty years, while beside them white-haired adults crawl in the feudal darkness of their childhood. Here a former cotton picker develops the sensitive hands of a surgeon, and men whose grandparents still believe in magic prepare optimistically to become atomic scientists. Here the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre. (296-7)
Within Ellison's treatise on the urban sphere of Harlem, the representational space of the South emerges and imparts the sense that multiple alternative geographies and temporalities can exist simultaneously. This idea complicates the terms of national "progress." As such, it is crucial to Ellison's critique of inequality and segregation. Because multiple contiguous temporalities give the lie to a unified, linear movement through time, the metanarrative of "progress" - and the concept of "the modern" which derives from it - undergoes a reconstruction: "It explains the nature of a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence" (Ellison 297, emphasis added). Modernist scholar Leigh Anne Duck clarifies how the spatial proximity of different temporal frameworks impacted the national psychology in the years leading up to Ellison's artistic emergence: "The idea that people living in contiguous space might inhabit different times emerged also from developments in psychological theory, which had become particularly interested in the temporal displacements of the individual mind" (152). Because he recognizes that black consciousness in Harlem is predicated on conflict and contradiction - indeed, he describes it as a kind of geographical schizophrenia - Ellison must move beyond the modern/primitive, center/periphery dichotomies to approximate a viable subjectivity within the urban condition. He accomplishes this by turning to the unique linguistic reservoir of Harlem's black vernacular.
II. Nowhere Man: Enunciating an Alternative Space
<14> Ellison sees the black residents of Harlem as existing under a contradictory political system. The irresolvable tension between a democratic ethos and sustained racial inequalities produce internal, psychic disruptions within America's marginalized subjects. However, in perhaps the essay's most powerful moment, Ellison sounds a redemptive note. He gives a voice to the city's residents, and he shows how a particular turn of phrase not only resists conditions of oppression, but also creates a new domain that exists beyond the hierarchical dialectics of centers and margins. He writes,
Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, [the Harlemites] feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where? Significantly, in Harlem, the reply to the greeting, "How are you?" is very often, "Oh, man, I'm nowhere " - a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word. Negroes are not unaware that the conditions of their lives demand new definitions of terms like primitive and modern, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral, patriotism and treason, tragedy and comedy, sanity and insanity. (297-8, emphases in original)
Clearly, this catalogue of opposites illustrates the need for a new epistemology, an alternative, third term that circumvents the divisive and alienating constraints of an "either/or" categorical imperative. The condition of being nowhere in Harlem provides the impetus for just such a rearrangement of the center/periphery spatial dichotomy. Indeed, "the conditions of their lives demand new definitions of terms," and with such a demand comes opportunity. Since he identifies that the phrase was commonly used, "nowhere" in Ellison's essay thus functions as a rhetorical "space of collective resistance" (Soja 35). The utterance carves out new territory and makes a claim to what Soja calls "a Thirdspace of political choice that is also a meeting place for all peripheralized or marginalized 'subjects' wherever they may be located. In this politically charged space, a radically new and different form of citizenship (citoyenneté) can be defined and realized" (35, emphases in original).
<15> Of course, it should be acknowledged that the phrase "I'm nowhere" is, on the surface, far from an outspoken and explicit cry for sociopolitical resistance. In fact, it sounds remarkably like a blues lyric. However, as Houston Baker, Jr. has shown, the blues "represents a force not unlike electricity" (6, emphasis in original). It is a symbolic response to racism and its material effects. Despite its desolate sound, its vernacular rhetoric has the ability to expose and subvert the discursive forces of white hegemony, which it does from the margins of lived experience. Donald J. Shaffer discusses the musical genre as Ellison employs it in Invisible Man: "The performance of the blues functions as a signifier for collective experience and as a symbolic means of establishing a sense of place and belonging in the city" (8). Given the communal use of the phrase "I'm nowhere" in Harlem and Lafargue, it attests to a shared reality in much the same way that the blues articulates a sense of collective struggle. The phrase, though, accomplishes far more than "establishing a sense of place and belonging in the city"; it also calls into question the very terms that dictate who belongs in what places in cities.
<16> When Ellison lists such terms as "modern and primitive" and "sanity and insantiy," his attention to hierarchical oppositions "expose[s] to debate the institutional arrangements that rely on the hierarchies and thus open[s] possibilities of change" (Culler 179). Given the emphasis on spatial, geographical markers in the essay, Ellison's critique of specific power structures has direct relevance to postcolonial theory. Indeed, contemporary critics such as John Callahan have identified Ellison as an "ambidextrous" writer, and I would argue that his multiple dexterities manifest in his prescient application of critical-theoretical discourse (qtd. in Blair 113). Frantz Fanon, writing at the same time as Ellison in a different cultural context, provides a perspective worth noting here. Indeed, his work as a psychiatrist and as a postcolonial theorist and activist necessitates his inclusion. Analyzing the psychology of the colonized black subject, Fanon shows how the center/periphery, metropole/colony spatial binaries have an extensive affective impact on the psyche of the colonized black subject. First published in French in 1952 - the same year as Ellison's Invisible Man - Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks provides an early intellectual testimony on global politics and race. However, where Fanon draws clear distinctions between the powerful center of the metropole and the repressed margins of the colonies, Ellison complicates the binary by recognizing that third-world conditions persist within the context of the so-called First World.
<17> In a sense, the Harlem residents in the essay occupy what Chela Sandoval recognizes as an "internally colonized community" (76). "Harlem Is Nowhere" thus collapses the spatial dichotomy between center and periphery, First World and Third. "Nowhere" serves as a strategic alternative. Neither "here" nor "there," the position confounds the epistemology that engenders fixed hierarchical spaces. The phrase enables the speaking subject to slip beyond the logical impasse that stymies, isolates, and others his subjectivity.
<18> Significantly, alongside its fascinating analysis of urban space, the essay also maintains a realistic outlook of the Harlem scene as it appeared under the conditions of the political status quo at midcentury. According to Ellison, the system of contradictions that surrounds and constrains the black subject can potentially cause a different quality of transcendence than that provided by the Thirdspace of "nowhere," "what Dr. Frederick Wertham, Director of the Lafargue Clinic, terms 'free-floating hostility,' a hostility that bombards the individual from so many directions that he is often unable to identify it with any specific object" (Ellison 301). Ellison distinguishes that this specific psychological state is qualitatively different than that of being "nowhere." Indeed, both constitute reactions to social marginality. However, the individual who concedes to being "nowhere" orally performs a social deconstruction that strategically moves beyond the hierarchical opposition of center/periphery. In contrast, "free-floating hostility" comprises an unreflective psychic consequence of institutional racism, and is perhaps best exemplified by Ellison's description of the man lobbing imaginary grenades in the street.
<19> Without undermining the ingenuity of its reflections on urban space and minority discourse, the essay is careful to observe an ambivalence toward the contradictions of living in black America. Near the conclusion, Ellison contemplates the impact that being nowhere exerts on one's personal identity and self concept: "[o]ne's identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One 'is' literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a 'displaced person' of American democracy" (300). In her long essay on abjection, Julia Kristeva articulates a sense of this drift in a way so closely resembling Ellison's that one wonders if she had "Harlem Is Nowhere" in hand as she worked:
Instead of sounding himself as to his 'being,' [the overdetermined subject] does so concerning his place: 'Where am I?' instead of 'Who am I?' For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one . . . but essentially divisible, foldable, catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines . . . constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. (8, emphases in original)
There is indeed critical potential in embracing the Thirdspace of "nowhere"; nonetheless, like Kristeva, Ellison reminds us that radical subjectivity is serious business. Saying "I'm nowhere" can unhinge the structures that constrain and marginalize, yet there remains the need to rebuild new and more empowering spaces, in both theory and practice.
<20> Ellison ultimately remains cautious of embracing wholesale a condition of radical subjectivity, of fluid and endless reinvention. This indicates a practical awareness on his part that conditions of displacement and inequality are very real and incredibly harsh. His discerning view on this matter anticipates that of bell hooks, who, in "Postmodern Blackness," issues a caveat regarding the poststructuralist tendency to eschew all forms of stability and structure at a time when historically dominated subjects are coming to voice for the first time (2482). In my emphasis on spatial discourse, however, I hope to show how questions about positionality - questions that produce such puzzling responses as "Oh, man, I'm nowhere" - can provide an alternative way of theorizing sociopolitical agency. Sounding from the internally constituted margin of the American ghetto, such voices are intimately aware of the ideology of their urban maze. Within such an awareness of place lie strategies of negotiation, the power of which Homi Bhabha describes best: "the exercise of power may be both politically effective and psychically affective because the discursive liminality through which it is signified may provide greater scope for strategic maneuver and negotiation" (208). Operating as a kind of urban geographer at mid-century, Ellison navigates the Harlem maze with an eye toward its cultural wreckage and the sociopolitical potential therein. To be sure, his analysis of Harlem bears a utility for us today as we continue, perhaps more than ever, to struggle with these dynamic processes in our American cityscapes, processes that continue to involve racial conflict, urban displacement, and ghettoization.
Notes
[1] For more on the mission, history, and operations of the Lafargue Clinic, see Dennis Doyle, "'Where the Need is Greatest': Social Psychiatry and Race-Blind Universalism in Harlem's Lafargue Clinic, 1946-1958," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83.4 (Winter 2009): 746-74. For further information about Lafargue, including records of patients' personal experiences there, see Doyle, "'A Fine New Child': The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American Communities, 1946-1958," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64.2 (April 2009): 173-212.
[2] 48 magazine originally commissioned Ellison to write the essay about Lafargue. While developing the project, he worked closely with the photographer Gordon Parks. Ellison felt that the genre of the photo essay would be the most suitable for the subject, because it would "transform his theories about Harlem's schizophrenia and day-to-day psychoses into visual images" (Jackson 372). However, 48 declared bankruptcy in June of that year, and Ellison was unable to give "Harlem Is Nowhere" a public audience until 1964 - and even then without the photographs. The photographs are housed in the Ellison Archives at the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
[3] Many viewed the Harlem Riots of 1935 and 1943 as sure signs that the city was experiencing its death agonies, and these events most definitely
contributed to the overall form and force of the essay. For more on the history of the riots, see Gill.
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