Ralph Ellison's Harlem Footprint

Ralph Ellison Adopted Harlem as His Home

One of the key figures of 20th century Literary Harlem was Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, and his footprint is all over Harlem.

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914, but after attending Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, in 1936, he moved to New York and began working with the Federal Writers' Project, part of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration.

The first place he stayed was at the YMCA on 135th Street. A few years afterwards, he moved to 312 West 122nd Street, the home of his first wife, Rose Araminta Poindexter. Later they moved to 453 West 140th Street, before divorcing in 1945. He ended up living at 730 Riverside Drive, also known as the Beaumont, with his second wife, Fanny McConnell, the founder of the Negro People’s Theater in Chicago.

This last residence is the reason why his memorial sculpture is located at 150th Street in Riverside Park. Dedicated in 2003, it consists of a bronze monolith from which the famed artist Elizabeth Catlett, cut the silhouette of a striding man, a reference to Ellison’s famous novel.

An inscription on the monument quotes Ellison’s reflections about what coming to Harlem meant to him:

“The very idea of being in New York was dreamlike, for like many young negroes of the time, I thought of it as the freest of American cities, and considered Harlem as the site and symbol of Afro-American progress and hope. Indeed, I was both young and bookish enough to think of Manhattan as my substitute for Paris, and of Harlem as a place of Left Bank excitement. So now that I was there in its glamorous scene, I meant to make the most of its opportunities.”

He got to know Langston Hughes, Romare Bearden, Richard Wright and Gordon Parks (with whom he collaborated on a photographic essay called, ‘Harlem is Nowhere’, about the first racially integrated psychiatric hospital , called The Lafargue Clinic).

Ellison won the National Book Award in 1953. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994, of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in Hamilton Heights.

ER/BR