Remembering the Civil Rights

Next year, it will be 50 years since the famous speech of ''I Have a Dream'' was delivered by Martin Luther King on Washington DC. 13 years before this event occurred, the novel of the Invisible Man, was released, and takes place as a central piece the racism that took place prior to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Particularly at the beginning of the novel, we see various stunning similarities with what would take place just a decade later. The scene in which the narrator gets in a fight with a group of white guys in a stripper place apparently, strikes as a foreshadowing of what was coming.

At first obviously, the narrator is faced with a common fight that made up the life of the United States, back when racism was far more present in the face of the African American and the White ethnicities. After getting severely beated up to the point that he as blood coming out of his lip, Our narrator is faced up with one choice, and that is to defend himself through speech. Curiously by the end, he seems to have gained respect from the crowd that beated him up in the first place and is congartulated.

This same technique that the narrator of the Invisible Man did at first, is something that curiously is seen again, but well in real life, as a way that African Americans protested for the rights they deserved to have ever since the Civil War had ended a century prior. And this time it worked to be praised by the US at the time, and change history forever. How would know this novel was kind of a premonition of what was about to come?

I'm the Invisible Man

Well, besides the fact that Queen's drummer got the inspiration to do the Invisible Man song after he read the book by Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, takes off in the beginning of the book, explaining why he considers himself an Invisible Man:

''I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to posses a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.''Pg. 3

So, here we understand that this main character, has probably either been discriminated off some sort, which made him become ''invisible'' to a lot of people who refused to see him. We see also, as we read back, how the main character goes back to see and reflect some of the important moments in his life. One of them, proves to be the last words his grandfather told him before he died, which not even the protagonist understands exactly what it means:

''Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.'' Pg. 16

We still don't know exactly where all of this is going, but this book has been the most interesting one we have read so far.