4. “I am an
“invisible man.
“No, I am not a spook like those who
“ haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I
“ one of your Hollywood ectoplasms.
5.
6. I am a man of substance, of flesh and
bone, and liquids, and I might even be
said to possess a mind.
I am invisible, understand, simply
because people refuse to see me….
When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of
their imagination — indeed, everything
and anything except me.
7.
8. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of
biochemical accident to my epidermis.
That invisibility to which I refer occurs
because of a peculiar disposition of the
eyes of those with whom I come into
contact.
A matter of construction of their inner
eyes, those eyes with which they look
through their physical eyes upon reality.
9.
10. I am not complaining, nor am I
protesting either.
It is sometimes advantageous to be
unseen, although it is most often rather
wearing on the nerves. Then, too, you’re
constantly being bumped against by
those of poor vision.
Or again, you often doubt if you really
exist.
11.
12. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a
phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a
figure in a nightmare which the sleeper
tries with all his strength to destroy.
13.
14. It’s when you feel like this that,
out of resentment,
you begin to
bump people
back.”
15. It’s when you feel like this that,
out of resentment,
you begin to
bump people
back.”
58. Today I have stood…from this
Cradle of the Confederacy, this
very Heart of the Great AngloSaxon Southland, that today we
sound the drum for freedom as
have our generations of
forebears before us done, time and
time again through history…
59. Let us…send our answer to the
tyranny that clanks its chains upon
the South. In the name of the
greatest people that have ever trod
this earth, I draw the line in the
dust …and I say . . . segregation
today . . . segregation tomorrow . . .
segregation forever.
60. “They [white
southerners] are
not bad people.
All they are
concerned about
is…that their
sweet little girls
are not required
to sit in school
alongside some
big overgrown
Negroes.”
90. “We had breakfast while we were waiting for
the rain to stop, and I [was] sitting with the
[Indianapolis] Clowns in a restaurant behind
Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all
the plates in the kitchen after we were
finished eating. What a horrible sound.
91. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we
were in the capital in the land of freedom
and equality, and they had to destroy the
plates that had touched the forks that had
been in the mouths of black men.
If dogs had eaten off those plates,
they’d have washed them.”
92. “There was often a hate letter or two in the
mail, and I was always concerned about
Barbara and the kids being abused when
they went to the ballpark….
Returning to the South took some of the boy
from Mobile out of me, and replaced it with a
man who was weary of the way things were.
