Institution

Ralph Ellison’s father, Lewis, had taken a job delivering ice in parts of Oklahoma City, and the business proved successful enough for the ambitious new father to move his family to spacious quarters in a home facing white families at the 400 block of Byers. In 1916, relations with white residents were calm, and on North Byers, the Ellisons were only a block away from the prestigious Third Street, prominently owned by white families. Third Street had paved roads, well-manicured lawns and backyards, the epitome of suburban living and prosperity for Lewis and Ida Ellison. Oklahoma City’s path to urbanization and gentility seemed matched to the couple. Tragically, Lewis Ellison did not live long in the house at 314 N. Byers. By June of that year, he died in an experimental surgery following an accident delivering ice to a local grocery store. After his death, Ida became the sole supporter of the family, and they would no longer have the luxury of spacious quarters in their living arrangements.

Detail map of 314 N Byers, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma

This house was described as a spacious home facing Bryant School, a school for white students, across Byers to the west. The Ellisons were in the vanguard of Black families moving into the area in 1916 and there was only one other Black family as their neighbors on their quiet, paved, tree-lined street.

Ralph Ellison Family's (1916) 314 N. Byers

This driving tour or heritage trail offers an exploration of the life of National Book Award winner Ralph Ellison in his hometown of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The tour begins at Ellison's birthplace and moves throughout the downtown area before moving on to sites around the city that are also related to the life of Ellison and other African American residents in the early 20th century. The authors of this trail used Sanborn maps, city directories, and other resources to identify the location of important Black institutions such as schools and churches, some of which have been demolished to create interstate highways. This trail can be used to travel to all or some of the sites identified. This trail can also serve as an educational resource accessible from any location and it is downloadable as a printable PDF.   

African American novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison originally studied music and art but was drawn eventually to the world of literature. Ellison spent seven years writing Invisible Man and although it was the only novel published in his lifetime, it gained him a place as a respected American writer and remains one of the central texts of the twentieth-century canon.

Born on March 1, 1913, at 405 First Street in Oklahoma City, Ellison was the son of Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap Ellison, southerners who were only one generation away from slavery. Transplanted in a western state smacking of new promise, they named their son after the 19th century American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. After his father’s death from a work-related injury in 1916, Ellison’s mother moved her two sons to various parts of the young city, supporting the family in menial jobs that often forced her to rent small apartments and even servants’ quarters in both the segregated black and white sections of town.

At the age of eight, Ellison began learning the trumpet, an instrument that sparked his interest in jazz music, which was coming of age in the early 1920s. By high school, Ellison played lead trumpet in the high school band and received musical instruction from Zelia Breaux, who he would later refer to as like “a second mother” to him. In Deep Deuce’s thriving jazz clubs of the time, the young Ellison received a more informal education by listening to touring greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie as well as local legends like the Blue Devils and Jimmy Rushing.

In 1932, Ellison graduated with honors from Douglass High School in Oklahoma City and by 1933 he had decided to study music as a vocation. He enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington’s well-known African American university in Alabama, to pursue a music degree. It was there, however, that he met Professor Morteza Drexel Sprague, his most important teacher at Tuskegee. Professor Sprague exposed Ellison to literature, masterworks like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the works of writers like Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Joyce, and Stein, as well as currents in contemporary Black artistic thought. Ellison did not graduate from Tuskegee, but in the spirit of the protagonist he created in his classic novel, Invisible Man, moved to Harlem, the center of the burgeoning black arts movement, in 1936, where he met influential black writers like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. It was in Harlem, as well, that Ellison tried his hand at the fine arts, dabbling in sculpture as he interned in the studio of a preeminent African American sculptor, Richmond Barthé

After years of work in a variety of prose genres, including the essay and short story, Ellison finished Invisible Man in April of 1952 to mostly admiring reviews. It became an instant bestseller, receiving the National Book Award the following year. One of the most important and definitive novels in American literature, the novel centers on—and illuminates—the Black experience in America with clarity and wit. According to New York Times contributor Adam Bradley, “Through his protagonist’s voice, Ellison was making the audacious claim that he, a young Black writer in segregated America, could conceive a young Black character with the capacity to speak to the universalities of human experience through the dogged particulars of his own” (2021). In the years since its publication, Ralph Ellison’s classic has resonated across social and racial divides.

Ralph Ellison was always fond of his hometown. “I was born at 407 East First Street and lived any number of places on the East Side…As you might suspect, I loved the city in which I grew up. My parents came to the city shortly before statehood. Many of my old friends, schoolmates, employers and teachers are still residents there, as are the relatives of whom I’m fondest…[A]lthough I’m no longer in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City is still very much in me and turns up frequently in my dreams and in the fantasies and memories that inform my writing. I consider this a strength and a joy."

Newlyweds Lewis A. and Ida Ellison rented a one-room apartment in the rear of the wood frame house on this site owned by J. D. and Uretta Randolph in 1909. On March 1, 1913, the National Book Award-winning author Ralph Ellison was born in the Randolph's home. The Randolphs were an important influence in the writer's youth.

Ralph Ellison Birthplace

Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church was the spiritual, social, and even political center of the lives of Ida Ellison and her two young boys after the premature death of her husband Lewis. Though keeping up the rigorous theology of heaven and hell, the A.M.E. church preached the importance of this world and not just the next. Ida's progressivism obviously found the politics of the church in line with her own. It was, however, the Avery Chapel emphasis on music that most influenced her son Ralph. With classical music often included under the direction of the university-trained choir director, Dr. William Haywood, Ellison would have his first exposure to sophisticated music. In addition, Avery Chapel hosted musicals and vocal recitals to further inspire Ellison's love of music. He would later write, "In our A.M.E. church the choir director was one of the local physicians who disdained the spirituals. He preferred the more formal religious music. The church had an organ, and orchestra, and a fair-sized choir which performed the music of Handel."

Ralph Ellison's mother, Ida Ellison, was an ardent member of Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African American congregation in Oklahoma City. After the death of her husband Lewis Ellison, Ida and her two sons lived in the Avery parsonage in exchange for custodial duties. Ralph attended the church-sponsored Kindergarten in this building.

Avery Chapel A.M.E. Church

The Black Dispatch had been founded by Ida Ellison's friend Roscoe Dunjee in 1915 to probe the politics that had forced the popular Black president of Langston University to fall from power and grace. Set on a trajectory of social justice, the newspaper became a mouthpiece for racial and economic equality, exposing those injustices in terms of unconstitutionality. One of Dunjee's most important fights in the years of Ellison's childhood was the state of Oklahoma's "separate but equal" segregation policy. Articles and editorials in the Black Dispatch appealed to its readers' reason, and although he delivered its newspapers throughout the east side of Oklahoma City, Ellison was not always convinced of the ethos of Dunjee and his pioneering newspaper. "Mr. Roscoe Dun[g]ee, the editor and publisher of our local Black newspaper, was writing very eloquent editorials suggesting that the real clue, the real ground for solving the racial predicament, rested in the Constitution. I read his editorials, but I must confess that with my youthful cynicism, I didn't quite believe them. But anyway, the men in the barbershop believed in the spirit of the law, if not in its application. As for me, I saw no hope in the law. It was to be obeyed in everyday affairs, but in instances of extreme pressure, it was to be defied, even at the cost of one's life."Letters from Ellison after Invisible Man was published in 1952 reveal Ellison's hurt feelings that the Black Dispatch, still in publication, hadn't reviewed or mentioned the novel, as had Oklahoma City's dominant, white newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman. The Black Dispatch continued to have a presence in Oklahoma City until 1982, and Ellison was sent complimentary copies of the the newspaper up until the end.

Crusading journalist and civil rights leader Roscoe Dunjee established the Black Dispatch newspaper in Oklahoma City in 1915. From his office just off busy Second Street, Dunjee kept Black readers informed of news and events of interest to them and from their perspective. He also used the newspaper as a platform to attack Oklahoma's Jim Crow laws. As a teenager, Ralph Ellison had a 4 am Black Dispatch paper route, delivering the daily paper to homes on the northeast side before school.

The Black Dispatch

Continually ambitious, despite circumstances, and proud, the Lewis and Ida Ellison family moved into a newly constructed single-family house at 218 N. Stiles when Ralph was about eighteen months old. The house was in a new neighborhood located in the Military Addition, part of a boom in real estate allowing Blacks to push north and east in expanding Oklahoma City. The house was the last house on the eastern side of the avenue, likely rented to the family by the influential J.D. Randolph, who would be an important influence throughout Ralph’s years in Oklahoma City. North Stiles overlooked the rear of Second Street, the rising Black commercial hub of the east side of the city. A series of wood-framed businesses included Andrew Rushing’s café, Dr. Webster Slaughter’s thriving medical practice, a dental office, and a pharmacy. This promising environment would have upheld the couple’s dream of defying residential jim crow and justifying their choice to come to the American West instead of staying in the Deep South. Similar aspirations motivated Ida Ellison during her residence on N. Stiles. She became an active political campaigner in the 1914 election for state and national Socialist candidates Fred Holt, a coal miner turned Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate, and Eugene Debs, the presidential candidate.

With the arrival of Ralph Ellison, the small one-room apartment at the rear of the J. D. Randolph home on East First was no longer sufficient to house the growing family of Lewis and Ida Ellison. In 1914, the family moved a half-block north into this single-family home on Stiles Avenue.

Ellison Family's Home (1914) 218 N. Stiles

Not primarily a shoeshine parlor at all, Richardson’s was an open-air bootlegging establishment owned by Hallie Richardson, referred to as “Fat Hallie” because of the stash of illegal spirits hidden in his paunch. In spite of the tight moral reins Ida Ellison kept on her teenage son Ralph, he got into Richardson’s Shoeshine Parlor by sweeping floors and shining shoes. At this time, Ellison was a budding musician, having practiced endless hours on his musical instrument of choice, the trumpet. And he knew how to read music, too. Working at Richardson’s gave him the opportunity to sit in on Blue Devils’ practices and even occasionally show off how he could sight read music. From these experiences he came to appreciate the discipline and self-sacrifice of these popular musicians as well as the potential ways in which the arts could bend the social mores of the day.“My first instrument in the school band was the mellophone. I’d loan mine to Hot Lips Page and the other Blue Devil trumpeters would borrow from the other members of the mellophone section in order to play special chorus. In exchange, I’d insist upon being allowed to sit in on trumpet during a Blue Devils rehearsal. I could read better than some of the jazzmen so very often I’d be asked to arbitrate when they got ito arguments over interpretation. I also played solos with the band at weddings. I also held first chair in the [Douglass] school orchestra. I wasn’t able to do much about jazz gigs because I was still an adolescent, and my widowed mother kept a tight rein on me”

"Fat Halley" Richardson was a local bootlegger who earned his nickname from hiding large quantities of liquor under his coat as he made his deliveries around town. His shine parlor was the place to hear the latest music and see the latest dance craze. With youths normally excluded, Ralph Ellison gained access to Halley's by sweeping floors and shining shoes during the day so he could see the shows at night.

Richardson's Shoeshine Parlor

One of the only Black theaters in Oklahoma City, the Aldridge was co-owned by Ellison’s well-known mentor, Zelia Breaux. Able to symbolically bridge high and low culture, she had opened it in the center of the “Deep Second” entertainment district as early as 1919 and named it after the nineteenth-century Shakespearean Ira Aldridge. At the Aldridge, ticketholders of all rank and class had access to King Oliver, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith, as well as prestigious Harlem-based theater troupes like the Lafayette Players, one of the first African-American acting groups in America.Of Zelia Breaux, Ellison would later write “...it was here that she made valuable contributions to the popular arts. For while she discouraged students from playing jazz, she also saw to it that our community was provided the best … entertainers. In her Aldridge Theater one could see and hear the great blues singers, dancers, comedians, the famous jazz orchestras and…repertory drama groups…[S]he provided a cultural nexus in which the vernacular art forms could be encountered along with the classical.”

The Aldridge Theater was co-owned by Zelia Breaux, the gifted music teacher who influenced local jazz greats, including Ralph Ellison. A major venue in the East Second Street entertainment district, the Aldridge hosted the biggest names in regional and national jazz circles as well as screening movies. For a time, too young to enter and too poor to afford a ticket, Ralph would listen from the alley. Later, as a student of Breaux he would meet legends like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey at the Aldridge.

Aldridge Theater

The 300 block of Second Street, or Deep Deuce, was the music and entertainment mecca of the East Side, Oklahoma City's exclusively Black enclave. Ruby Lyon's Cafe, like other popular establishments in the Deuce, provided the venue for popular blues and jazz, a contrast to the classical music education that Ralph Ellison was receiving at Douglass School and in the Aldridge Theater. If only through its windows, he could hear the line up from Ruby Lyon's stage, the likes of Walter "Hot Lips" Page and his Blue Devils. "…in those days there wasn’t that kind of distinction made between rhythm and blues; the South westerner bands played both…The term ‘Blue Devils’ is English and referred to a state of psychic depression, but during the range wars in cattle country those who were given to cutting barbwire fences were called ‘Blue Devils.' Perhaps Walter Page chose the name because of its outlaw connotations.”

The Ruby and Rae Lyons were impresarios of sorts who operated a billiard parlor and café known variably as Ruby's Grill, Ruby's Café or Lyon's Den on the East Second strip known as Deep Deuce. Regardless of the name, Ruby's was a hotbed of Black entertainment in the 1920s and 1930s. As a youngster, Ralph Ellison would hang out around the windows outside and listen to all the hottest music from around the country.

Ruby Lyon's Cafe

Home to various entities during its lifetime, the Slaughter Building was owned by Dr. Wyatt Slaughter, the physician who delivered Ralph Ellison. Married to Edna Randolph, one of Ida Ellison’s closest friends, Dr. Slaughter rode the eastside Oklahoma city wave of Black affluence through buying property like this one, which included the segregated branch library, Randolph Drugs, and Slaughter Hall. The Slaughter Building held many memories for Ellison.For Randolph Drugs, a teen-aged Ellison made deliveries for the pharmacist after school and would sometimes do office work for dentist Dr. T. J. Randolph.Of the library, Ellison explained, “...when a segregated library branch was set up in our community, Tracy [McCleary] and his brother Willard and I ran through the so-called boys’ books, westerns and detective stories in a rapid sweep and were soon devouring such adult books as we could get down. I read my first Freud, A.A. Brill’s translation of The Psychology of Dreams that I by no means understood–during that exciting period”Of Slaughter Hall, his memories would be equally eloquent: "'Listen, they're raising hell down at Slaughter Hall,’ and we’d turn our heads westward to hear Jimmy’s [Rushing’s] voice soar up the hill and down, as pure and as miraculously unhindered by distance and earthbound things as is the body in youthful dreams of flying. ‘Now, that’s the Right Reverend Jimmy Rushing preaching now, man,' someone would say. ‘Yeah, and that’s old Elder Hot Lips signifying along with him, urging him on, man.’ And keeping it building, ‘Huh, but thought you can hear him out this far, Ole Deacon Big-un [the late Walter Page] is up there patting his foot and slapping on his big belly [the bass viol] to keep those fools in line.’"

When the public library segregated in 1921, a branch library was opened in a storefront in the newly constructed Slaughter Building. Ralph later wrote that the library became a sanctuary where he could access his fullest emotional range. The building was also home to Randolph Drugs and Ralph made deliveries for the pharmacist after school in his teen years and would sometimes do office work for dentist Dr. T. J. Randolph.

The Slaughter Building

On the northeast corner of Second Street and Stiles, stood University Hospital, the hospital to which Ralph Ellison’s father, Lewis, was taken after being injured by a large block of ice while making a delivery to Salter’s grocery store in the steamy month of June 1916. The block of ice had perforated Lewis’s already ulcerated stomach, and the doctors there were unable to shore up the wound due to the existing inflammation and infection. While his infection spread, hospital surgeons debated what kind of surgery to perform. After almost one month, Dr. L. E. Sauerport took a gamble on an experimental surgery, which failed. Lewis Ellison died the day after on July 19, 1916, leaving his wife Ida, son Ralph, aged three, and newborn son, Herbert, emotionally and financially devastated. Years later, Ellison recreated the scene with the visual tenderness of a screenplay writer: “We had said good-bye and he had made me a present of the tiny pink and yellow wild flowers that had stood in the vase on the window sill, had put a blue cornflower in my lapel. Then a nurse and two attendants had wheeled in a table and put him on it. He was quite tall and I could see the pain in his face as they moved him. But when they got him covered his feet made little tents of the sheets and he made me a joke about it, just as he had many times before. He smiled then and said good-bye once more, and I had watched, holding on to the cold white metal of the hospital bed as they wheeled him away. The white door closed quietly and I just stood there, looking at nothing at all. Nearby I could hear my mother talking quietly with the physician. He was explaining and she was asking questions. They didn’t talk long, and when they finished we went out of the room for the last time. Holding on to my fist, my mother led me down the silent corridor heavy with the fumes of chloroform. She hurried me along. Ahead of us I saw a door swing ajar and watched it, but no one came out, then as we passed I looked inside to see him, lying in a great tub-like basin, waiting to be prepared for his last surgery. I could see his long legs, his knees propped up and his toes flexing as he rested there with his arms folded over his chest, looking at me quite calmly, like a kindly king in his bath. I had only a glimpse, then we were past. We had taken the elevator then and the nurse had allowed me to hold the control and she laughed and talked with me as we went down to the street. Outside, as we moved along the winding drive into the blazing sun, I had told my mother but she wouldn’t believe me that I had seen him. I had though, and he had looked at me and smiled. It was the last time I saw my father alive.”

Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis was injured during an ice delivery when a block of ice shattered and a shard pierced his abdomen. Ralph was in the delivery wagon parked nearby. Lewis was rushed to this training hospital for the OU School of Medicine and died three days later on 19 July 1916.

University Hospital

Bryant School, an elementary school for white students, was located a block from the Ellison house on Geary, and from that distance, the young Ralph could see the school from his front porch. Not being able to attend the white school because of segregation, he felt the irony of having to walk eight blocks to Douglass, the school serving Black children from elementary through high school. The long walk took Ellison and other Geary street children through alley ways and the busy streets of the East First Street business district, and over the switch engines and trains of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific lines via a steel viaduct and straight down Walnut Avenue. Parents like Ida Ellison were appalled at their children's exposure to the underworld inhabitants of this corridor, but for Ellison the experience of seeing prostitutes and pimps became both a cultural and racial education: “...once the tracks were safely negotiated you continued past warehouse, factories, and loading docks, and then through a notorious red light district where Black prostitutes in brightly colored housecoats and Mary Jane shoes supplied the fantasies and needs of a white clientele.”

This impressive brick school was built for the exclusive use of white children in 1911 while Black children had to walk a mile south through the railyards to wood-frame Douglass School. Still, Ralph and other African American boys learned to march and drill from Black Spanish-American War and WW I veterans on the grounds of Bryant School on weekends. In 1947 the school was converted to a segregated school for Black children and renamed Inman Page School.

Bryant School

In the more genteel neighborhoods of Ralph Ellison's early childhood in the prosperous east-side Black community, Tabernacle Baptist Church loomed large. The aura of its vivacious preacher, Ezelle W. Perry, loomed even larger. Although the Ellison family was active in Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church rather than Perry's rival congregation, the pre-school Ralph, yet without siblings, looked for playmates in the adjacent backyards of his home and Reverend Perry's. Among the Perry children was a girl, Darlene, Ralph's age, who joined him riding a tricycle, roaming the alleys, and chasing the fighting cocks along East Second Street and Bryant Avenue.

The Reverend Ezell W. Perry was the pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church which stood three blocks west at 319 East Second. Ralph Ellison was a friend and playmate of the Perry children. Ralph's fascination with birds is attributed to his encounters with the fighting roosters in the Perry's backyard which met the Ellison's backyard on North Byers.

Reverend E. W. Perry's Home

After a brief stint between 1921 and 1922 living in a white neighborhood while Ida worked in an apartment building on West Main, by the middle of 1922, she and her boys moved to 827 East Second Street. Back in the Deuce, Ralph quickly regained footing in both the high and low cultural spheres of the Black community. He had both books and the blues. While the Ellison family lived on East Second, Ralph had ready access to the only library he would be able to enter in segregated Oklahoma City, the hastily set up Dunbar Branch Library. And from the many entertainment establishments on East Second, young Ralph would begin to pay attention to the rhythms of blues and jazz.

Ida Ellison struggled to provide for her family after the death of her husband, Lewis in 1916. She and her sons, Ralph and Herbert, moved frequently around northeast Oklahoma City most often because of eviction after unpaid rent. In 1922, the family moved into a house owned by J. D. Slaughter, a local businessman and real estate entrepreneur who took the young Ralph Ellison under his wing.

Ellison Family Home (1922) -- 827 East Second Street

Ida Ellison married her third husband, John Bell, in 1929, and the widowed [or divorced] Bell moved in with Ida and her two high school-aged sons at 710 East Second Street, not far from the Rock Island Round House. “...In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the tracks, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late spring night I could hear Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, caring to me as clear as a full-bored riff on ‘Hot Lips’ Page’s horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were some ideal native to the time and to the land.” The house at 710 East Second would be Ralph's last residence in Oklahoma City. Although Elllison's love affair with jazz kept distracted him from thoughts of yet another man in his mother's life, John Bell, seems to have been a courteous stepfather, though Ralph’s brother Herbert claimed that they were not on good terms. While a student at Tuskegee, Ralph corresponded with Bell, who at one point sent a small token to the struggling undergraduate, a one-dollar bill, adding that he wished it had been a hundred.

When Ralph Ellison's mother Ida married a third time, the family moved to a home on this site in the early 1930s, Ralph was a high school upper classman at Douglass during his residency in this house, but was frequently absent because of his active social life. This was Ralph Ellison's last home in Oklahoma City.

Ellison Family Home (1929) -- 710 East Second

Earning on average six dollars a week and often facing rent of ten, Ida Ellison found a job cleaning test tubes at University Hospital in 1923, and this, possibly combined with continued work cleaning hotels, provided her the luxury of moving up the social ladder to the house at 822 East Fourth Street. Fourth Street signified success to Black Oklahoma City. The Ellison family seemed to have lived uninterruptedly for a year at this location. The house on Fourth would become a home in Ellison's memory. “[T]here is hardly a week that passes that I don’t dream of home. Sometimes it’s the little house in the Eight Hundred block on east Second, one of [Edna Slaughter’s]; or again it’s 409 East Third, or most frequently, the little house at 822 East Fourth Street.” Later he not only appreciated the influential friendship he made with the artistic boy next door, Frank Mead, but the ready access he gained to the streetcar line as well as home-grown vegetables from his mother's garden: "[M]y mother was a former Georgia farm girl who kept a kitchen garden back when we lived next door to Frank Mead on East Fourth Street. She also raised chickens, sweet peas, and guinea fowl.” Though in 1924, Ida Ellison took her boys to live with her sister-in-law Lucretia Brown and later to McAlester, Oklahoma, 125 miles east, she moved them back to 822 East Fourth Street, a return likely to help seal its status as home in Ellison’s imagination. “...How memory fades! There was a time when I could remember every family on that block but now the best I can come up with are Randolphs, Bowens, Baileys, Haywoods, Bethels, Hyatts, Youngs (I.W.), Sanders (Lizzie), Williams, Crawfords, Price and McCleary.”

Ralph Ellison's family continued to move households frequently in the early 1920s as the widowed Ida Ellison try to make ends meet for her young family. In 1923, Ida and brothers Ralph and Herbert moved to this home on East Fourth which was developing into a busy thoroughfare that would eventually become the heart of the northeast side.

Ellison Family Home (1923) -- 822 East Fourth Street

When the widowed Ida Ellison moved to 822 East Fourth Street in 1923, she landed her two boys, Ralph and Herbert, in the prosperous enclave of Black Oklahoma City. Lying along the ambitious streetcar line, East Fourth signified success, and even if Ida was defying all odds by occupying such a significant neighborhood, it offered Ralph an opportunity to enlarge his childhood imagination through an introduction to the arts through his new next door neighbor, eleven-year-old Frank Mead. The young Mead was an avid sketcher and chronicler of the east side of Oklahoma City, and he filled notebooks with cartoons and caricatures from their city blocks. His pantheon of characters included the stuff of boyhood fantasy--Black cowboys, local gangsters, outlaws, and detectives. Frank sparked Ellison's love of art. Years later, Ellison was to say of him, "Frank was simply the hero of my childhood." In addition to art, the Mead family also influenced Ralph's musical prowess. By 1924, Frank's father Joseph was giving both boys music lessons in the backyard; Frank on a trumpet and Ralph on the E-flat horn. It was only a few years later that Ralph himself would trade in for a trumpet. Thirty years later, the year after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison returned to Oklahoma City, where he was surprised to meet the hero of his childhood on a city street. "...just as I stepped out of the car who should I see coming up the street smoking a cigar but Frank Mead, the boy who lived next door to the house where I spent some of the happiest days of my childhood. We must have talked an hour or longer before I realized that I was keeping my cousin waiting and grabbed a cab for her house."

The Meads were the next door neighbors of Ralph Ellison's family in the early 1920s. Frank Meade was a playmate of Ralph's and was talented in drawing and painting. It was his friendship with Frank that brought the first stirrings of a love of the arts, especially after Franks' father taught both boys to play the horn.

Mead Family Home

At the end of 1921, Ralph Ellison gained access to a new and improved, though still segregated, library far-outshining the small store-front library in the Slaughter Building. The Dunbar Public Library was hastily constructed, likely to avoid a lawsuit in the vein of those brought to the courts by Black Dispatch owner and civil rights advocate, Roscoe Dunjee. The building had once contained a pool hall but transformed into a library and reading room under the direction of Miss Alphenia Young and Lillian E. Youngblood, its collection promised to challenge the likes of the young Ellison and his “Renaissance Men.” The Dunbar Library was mainly made up of second hand or cast of books from Oklahoma City’s original Carnegie Library, but it still contained such adult authors as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Of his self-christened Renaissance Men (including, among others,Tracy and Willard McCleary, Frank Mead, Malcom and Lloyd Whitby, Hillard Bowen, and Harold Calicutt), Ellison later wrote, “Anything and everything was to be found in the chaos of Oklahoma; thus, the concept of the Renaissance Man has lurked long within the shadow of my past, and I shared it with at a half dozen of my Negro friends. How we actually acquired it I have never learned, and since there is no true sociology of the dispersion of ideas within the American democracy, I doubt I ever shall. Perhaps we breathed it in with the air of the Negro community of Oklahoma City, the capital of that state. Negroes were often charged by exasperated white Texans with not knowing their “place. Perhaps we took it defiantly from one of them. Or perhaps I myself picked it up from some transplanted New Englander whose shoes I had shined of a Saturday afternoon…Most likely, however my friends and I acquired the idea from some book or some idealistic Negro teacher, some dreamer seeking to function responsibly in an environment which at its most normal took on some of the mixed character of nightmare and of dream…Spurring us on in our controlled and benign madness was the voracious reading of which most of us were guilty.”

After the Oklahoma City Carnegie Library excluded Black residents in 1921, a library for Black residents was located in a storefront in the Slaughter Building on East Second. But in 1926 the Library Board built a new small building at 609 E 4 next door to the Brockway House community center at 615. Ralph Ellison was a frequent visitor to the library where he read everything he could get his hands on. The building was demolished during Urban Renewal in the late 1960s. Library service on the northeast side move further north and east and today the Ralph Ellison Library serves the area.

Dunbar Public Library

Frederick Douglass School provided Ralph Ellison a first-class education, accomplished through the character of its founder and principal, Dr. Inman Page, the first Black man to graduate from Brown University, and the quality of its music program director, Zelia Breaux, in every way a mentor to Ellison in his years at the school. Years later, he would explain proudly, “I am indeed a product of the Oklahoma City school system. And except for third grade, when I studied at the old Orchard Park School on Peach Street (now Brauer) and the seventh which found us living in McAlester, Oklahoma, I was a pupil at the old Douglass High School, located then at Walnut and California. The last time I was at home the building was being used as a warehouse by the Board of Education, but I began there in the first grade; played in, and was student director, of the band, and a member of the varsity football team, then known as the ‘Red Machine’; and it was from there, in 1931, that I graduated.”

Ralph Ellison began his formal education when he was enrolled in the first grade at Douglass School. This former all-white separate school (known as Webster School, 1898-1903) became the segregated Douglass School in 1903 and served all grades from first to eighth. In 1935 the name was changed to Wheatley School when Douglass moved to 600 block of N High in 1935.

Douglass School

Lewis Ellison, the father who was the subject of fantasies of memory for an older Ralph, was a physically strong, former soldier who found various jobs in his adopted Oklahoma City home. The tragic last of these was with the Steffen-Bretch Ice and Ice Cream Company for whom he supplied ice to both White and Black homes and grocery stores. As Ellison described it: “All of three years old, I was with him when he collapsed while mounting a ladder to place a block of ice in a grocery refrigerator.” This event, at such a young age, imprinted on Ellison’s mind, and later he described that “as a youth I would be bemused by a recurring fantasy in which, on my way to school of a late winter day I would emerge from a cold side street into the warm spring sun and there see my father, dead since I was three, rushing toward me with a smile of recognition and outstretched arms. And I would run proudly to greet him, his son grown tall."

Wichita, Kansas-based Nicholas Steffen and William Bretch brought their successful dairy and ice company to Oklahoma City's Bricktown area in the early 1900s. The company sold large blocks of ice, Steffen's brand ice cream and other dairy products. Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis Ellison, delivered Steffen-Bretch products to Black homes in northeast Oklahoma City beginning in 1916.

Steffen-Bretch Ice and Ice Cream Company

Escorted to the illustrious Tuskegee Institute by a veteran hobo and in-law of the J.D. Randolph family named Charlie Miller, Ellison jumped his first train headed east and south to Alabama with a switchblade in his pocket and a beret atop his head. Describing it later in straightforward terms, Ellison wrote:“During June of 1933, I found myself traveling by freight train in an effort to reach Tuskegee Institute in time to take advantage of a scholarship granted me. Having little money and no time left in which to earn the fare for a ticket I grabbed an armful of a freight car, a form of illegal travel quite common during the Great Depression. In fact, so many young men, young women, prostitutes, gamblers and even some quite respectable but impoverished elderly and middle-aged couples were hoboing that it was quite difficult for the railroad to control such passengers."“Sometimes I rode tops, sometimes coal cars,” Ellison explained in a letter to his mother immediately afterwards.Ellison's experiences hopping trains and avoiding "bulls" (railroad detectives) were later translated into his short story, "Hymie's Bull," identified as his first work of short fiction.

Unable to earn or borrow the $36 train fare to Alabama to attend Tuskegee Institute, Ralph Ellison teamed up with an experienced hobo to help him ride the rails in the summer of 1933. The two jumped a northbound train for St Louis before heading east to Louisville and south to Alabama. They chose the longer northern route because of the dangers facing Black hobos in the Deep South.

Santa Fe Railroad Railyards

Lewisohn’s was owned by Milt Lewisohn, a fashionable though slightly affected white man whose style the young Ellison emulated. The job not only afforded him a way to build the dapper wardrobe he wanted to take with him to Tuskegee but allowed him to count on $16 a summer operating the elevator. Caught in the cross hairs of bigotry even in the atmosphere of a business owned by a fairly progressive Jew, Ellison was stung by a manager’s request to address a white female peer as “Miss” while working the elevator. After Lewisohn caught Ellison reading George Bernard Shaw, he promoted Ellison to assistant window designer. Lewisohn’s long-term effect on Ellison is worth noting. Years later Jewish neighbors in Ellison’s New England home were impressed that he could speak Yiddish. Ellison reported that he had picked it up in Oklahoma City when he was young. Friends often attributed it to the fact that had worked for Jews in Oklahoma City. Ellison expressed, even in jest, an admiration of Jewish tradition, once teasing another Jewish friend, “...ain’t us colored folks got no relationship to Jewish tradition?...[W]e do after all, identify with the Hebrew children.”

Ralph Ellison was an elevator operator and general help in this store during his high school years in the early 1930s. It was here he received his first real, substantial income as well as a marked improvement in his dress. He formed a strong bond with the owner, Milt Lewinsohn.

Lewinsohn's Clothing Store

Lewis Ellison, Ralph Ellison’s father, found one of many jobs in the blooming new state of Oklahoma in construction of the Colcord Building. Erected by 1910, just three years after Oklahoma became a state, the Colcord was a building project with high aspirations that might very well have suited a man who had begun his youth with lofty ambitions. The structure itself had ambitions, too, namely, to withstand the kind of apocalyptic fires that had beset San Francisco in 1906. That fire had melted steel frame structures, and Charles Colcord hired workers experienced in concrete and steel work, many of whom were veterans like Lewis.“...[My father] worked as a construction foreman…and had a part in building the first steel and concrete building in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. Despite the ravages of Urban Renewal, some of the buildings are still standing in Oklahoma City, notably the Colcord Building, of which I possess a photograph of the topping-off ceremony. It was all of twelve stories, but in those days a miracle on that flat land…As a foreman he was to hire a number of boys who’ve now become prominent businessmen as water boys.”

The Colcord Building was the vision of pioneer Oklahoma City resident Charles F. Colcord. Designed in the Chicago Style by William Wells, the Colcord was one of the first concrete and steel buildings in the city. Construction began in 1909 and completed in 1910. One of the first jobs held by Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis, was on the construction crew for the Colcord.

The Colcord Building

Although Ellison never explicitly wrote of his stepfather, James Ammons, his relationship with him was not contentious and Ammons taught the young teenager Ralph how to track and hunt small game. This skill for an urban boy like Ralph was useful in many respects, one being to feed the fuel for what is believed to be Ellison’s first novel, the manuscript Slick (1939), whose protagonist tells fond tales of his youth in Oklahoma hunting game in Oklahoma with his out-of-work stepfather. After Ammons' untimely death, the Ellisons were forced to return to their nomadic existence, landing in one small room at 415 East Stiles. The home was owned by Cyril and Edna House. Cyril was a porter for the National Cash Register Company. Ellison’s mother returned to “Mrs. Ida Ellison.” Despite the cramped quarters on East Stiles, or perhaps because of them, Ellison took his trumpet playing to a new level, practicing for hours on his horn. As he later wrote, “Caught mid-range between my two traditions [classical and jazz]…I caused whole blocks of people to suffer. Indeed, I terrorized a good part of an entire city section. During summer vacation I blew sustained tones out of the window for hours, usually starting–especially on Sunday mornings–before breakfast. I sputtered whole days through…double-and triple-tonguing exercises with an effect like- that of a jackass hiccupping off a big meal of briars. During school-term mornings I practiced a truly exhibitionist ‘Reveille’ before leaving for school, and in the evening I generously gave the ever listening world a low, slow version of ‘Taps,’ ineptly played but throbbing with what in my adolescent vagueness felt was a romantic sadness. For it was farewell to day and a love song to life and a peace-be-with-you to all the dead and dying…Sometimes, inspired by the even then considerable virtuosity of …Charlie Christian (who during our school days played marvelous riffs on a cigar-box banjo), I’d give whole summer afternoons and the evening hours after heavy suppers of Black-eyed peas and turnip greens, cracklin’ bread and buttermilk, lemonade and sweet potato cobbler, to practicing hard-driving blues. Such food oversupplied me with bursting energy, and from listening to Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Clara Smith, who made regular appearance in our town, I knew exactly how I wanted my horn to sound…Despite those who complained and cried to heaven for Gabriel to blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and so hellishly hot that I’d forever put down my horn, there were more tolerant ones who were willing to pay in present pain for future pride. For who knew what skinny kid with his chops wrapped around a trumpet mouthpiece and a faraway look in his eyes might become the next Armstrong.”

In July, 1924, Ralph Ellison's widowed mother Ida married James Ammons who became stepfather to Ralph. For a time, Ammons brought stability to young Ralph's otherwise unsettled childhood. However when Ammons died unexpectedly two years later, the family was once again thrown into poverty and Ida and the Ellison boys moved here in 1926.

Ellison Family Home (1926) -- 415 East Stiles

The widowed Ida Ellison, with two young boys and only a small pension from her husband's military service, realized that domestic work did not pay enough to support the family. At Hadden Hall, she found a job with regular hours and regular pay as a chambermaid. The work was harder but paid substantially more than domestic work. And beyond that, such work, found by many women of color in older American cities, was more difficult to find in a young Oklahoma City without a substantial gentry. Work at Hadden Hall became one of two realities in Ida's life. Service at Avery Chapel A.M.E. was the second. There she was a steward, said "Amen" to vociferous preaching by Reverend Turner H. Wiseman, and received spiritual and emotional consolation after a long week of labor at Hadden Hall. Ralph Ellison later described how much distress the idea of his mother living in service caused him. Ida dealt with her stress in a different way, through a play on language that would help her dignify her work. She identified herself as a "janitress" and "custodian" in the various positions she held in Oklahoma City. She did this no doubt for her own as well as her sons' sense of pride.

After the death of Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis Ellison, the family was left in poverty, Ralph's mother, Ida Ellison, found employment as a chambermaid for white residents of Hadden Hall apartments to make ends meet which made a profound impact on the young future author. The building was constructed about 1910 and included single rooms and multi-room suites for lease.

Hadden Hall

“When I was a young boy I often went out to the Oklahoma State Capitol, where I assisted Mr. J. D. Randolph with his duties as custodian of the State Law Library. I was about eleven years old at the time, quite impressionable, and very, very curious about the mysterious legal goings-on of the legislators. All the more so because while I was never able to observe the legislature in session it was not at all unusual for me to look up form pushing a broom or dusting a desk to see one of the legislators dash into the library to ask Jeff–Mr. Randolph was always addressed by his first name–his opinion regarding some point of law. In fact, I soon came to look forward to such moments because I was amazed by the frequency with which Mr. Randolph managed to come up with satisfactory answers, even without consulting the heavy volumes which ranged the walls…I only knew that Mr. Randolph appeared to possess a surer grasp of law than certain of the legislators, and my youthful sense of justice led me to see his exclusion from the profession [of law] as an act of injustice."

Ralph Ellison's mentor, J. D. Randolph, was a highly-educated and successful businessman but later in life he took a job as custodian of the state capitol so he could have unlimited access to the state library. On weekends and other slow periods he would bring Ralph along so that he could be exposed to other careers like the law and politics.

Oklahoma State Capitol 

”I made my first trip to that burying ground when I was three, so I returned thirty-six years [later] to the place where much of my temperament was formed. Perhaps it is a law of civilization, of human life, that you must plant a man to make a man and the father’s tomb become the second womb of the son. Anyway, that was thirty-six years ago. Then the place seemed far from town, now the city has grown up around it, has absorbed it as life always absorbs death, and as I have absorbed that planting of my father. Now it has taken on a gentle serenity of waving willows and bending sycamores that was not so years ago, when the sheer terror of death looked out of the raw red clay mounds, the crude granite stones, the wild countryside. Now there is grass and tress and flowers and the usual polished stones the familiar names.”

Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis Ellison, was buried in the segregated section of Fairlawn Cemetery in 1916. The grave is located in the plot at Block 22, Row 6, #22 (pin is in the proximtiy but not the precise location of the grave). The Ellison's stillborn son, L. A. Ellison was also buried there in 1912.

Grave of Lewis Alfred Ellison, Fairlawn Cemetery

Already interested in music of all kinds and ambitious to produce it, Ralph Ellison took a bold step across Oklahoma City’s racial divide in 1928, introducing himself to Ludwig W. Hebestreit, a German born musician with a doctorate in music who had come to Oklahoma City to lead the music program at award-winning, white, Classen High School. He later founded another award-winning entity, the Oklahoma City Junior Symphony Orchestra. Hebestreit agreed to give Ralph music lessons, and Ralph rode the street car to McKinley Avenue on the west side of town to learn everything that the maestro had to offer. Never that attentive to the rigors of the schoolroom, as a Douglass High School student, Ellison began to apply his experience of jazz and blues to the classical techniques of his musical mentor. By 1929, Ellison had funneled his broad exposure to musical genres, instruments, and styles and decided on a career composing and conducting in “the statelier image of Breaux and Hebestreit.” While at Tuskegee, Ralph continued to be encouraged by letters from his German music teacher. Years later Ellison would explain his relationship to Hebestreit: “It was my special privilege to attend concerts at [Classen High School] as the personal guest of Dr. Ludwig Hebestreit, the director of the Little Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Hebersteit, who was the supervisor of public school music, also taught at Classen High and he gave me lessons on the trumpet in exchange for cutting his lawn.” The simplicity of the exchange was more monetary. In fact, Ralph paid Hebestreit $2 a week for trumpet lessons. “But the contact,” he concluded, “is worth ten times as much to me.”

German immigrant Ludwig Hebestreit was the head of musical instruction at all-white Classen High School in the 1920s and a founding member of the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra. He gave Ralph Ellison private advanced lessons in trumpet in exchange for Ralph mowing his lawn, 1930-31. Ralph received much more instruction than trumpet as Hebestreit taught him to deconstruct musical scores and often invited him to tag a long to symphony performances where he was often the only person of color in attendance.

Home of Ludwig Hebestreit

“Like so many kids of the twenties, I played around with radio—building crystal sets and circuits consisting of a few tubes, which I found published in radio magazines. At the time we were living in a white middle-class neighborhood [on 17th Street], where my mother was custodian for some apartments, and it was while searching the trash for cylindrical ice-cream cartons which were used by amateurs for winding tuning coils that I met a white boy who was looking for the same thing. I gave him some of the things I’d found and we became friends…[H]is father was pastor of the leading Episcopal church in Oklahoma City at that time…[H]is nickname was Hoolie and for kids of eight or nine that was enough. Due to a rheumatic heart Hoolie was tutored at home and spent a great deal of time playing by himself…For all of his delicate health, he was very intelligent and very alive. It didn’t take much encouragement from his mother, who was glad to have someone around to keep him company, for me to spend much of my free time helping with his experiments. By the time I left the community, he had become interested in short-wave communication and was applying for a ham license. I moved back into the Negro community and began to concentrate on music, and was never to see him again, but knowing this white boy was a very meaningful experience. It had little to do with the race question as such, but with our mutual loneliness and a great curiosity about the growing science of radio. It was important for me to know a boy who could approach the intricacies of electronics with such daring and whose mind was intellectually aggressive. Knowing him led me to expect much more of myself and of the world.”

Henry Bowman Otto Davis, "Hoolie," was a white playmate of Ralph Ellison and the two shared a love of electronics and radio gadgetry. The son of Rev. Franklin Davis of St. John's Episcopal Church, Hoolie was in poor health and his parents appreciated Ralph's friendship. Ellison said the well-educated Hooolie challenged him intellectually and gave him insight into the world of white people.

Hoolie Davis' Home

In the strict Jim Crow segregation of Oklahoma City of the 1920s, most Black families lived mainly east of the railroad track and north of Bricktown, but according to restrictions mathematically calculating the number of Blacks per area, small enclaves of Blacks could be found along the North Canadian River. Among these communities was West Town, a segment of Black Oklahoma City far away from the more prosperous east side and therefore often looked at pejoratively by Ellison’s family circle. In 1924, while living on Peach Avenue in West Town, Ellison met his lifetime friend Jimmie Stewart. The fast friendship of the boys was not without some conflict, particularly related to Ralph Ellison’s claim to bragging rights around the adventures of his deceased father, Lewis. An altercation under the Walnut Avenue viaduct led to a contest possibly fueled by Stewart wanting to prove that though he was from West Town, he could hold his own with the proud son of the well-traveled Lewis Ellison. Friends of the boys would later describe Jimmie Stewart as tall, even as a boy, and fast talking. As an adult, Stewart became a leader in Oklahoma City’s NAACP. Ellison’s correspondence with Stewart continued throughout his lifetime.

In the mid-1920s Ralph Ellison lived in the Black enclave of Oklahoma City called West Town in the home of his aunt, Lucretia Brown. Ralph made a life long friend in Jimmy Stewart during the time he lived in the neighborhood. Stewart was a long time president of the local NAACP and for many years he was the sole link Ellison had to his old life in Oklahoma City.

Stewart Family Home

“I am indeed a product of the Oklahoma City school system. And except for the third grade, when I studied at the old Orchard Park School on Peach Street (now Brauer) and the seventh which found us living in McAlester, Oklahoma, I was a pupil at the old Douglas High School, located then at Walnut and California,” Ellison bluntly pronounced in a letter to Oklahoma City school teacher Betty Cameron in 1972. His short tenure at Orchard Park School was very likely a result of his mother Ida's challenged finances. Biographers speculate that her young family moved in with her dead husband's sister, Lucretia Brown, who lived on Peach Street. As an elementary school student, the young Ralph was described as vacillating between shyness and aggression. In the required courses--English, history, arithmetic, and penmanship. He was never more than an average student.

Orchard Park School was the segregated school for children in the Black enclave of West Town. At the time Ralph Ellison attended the school there from 1924-1926, it consisted of flimsy wooden buildings with no heat nor running water nor indoor toilets. A more substantial building was built in the 1930s and is now the home of Jesus House.

Orchard Park School

Lucretia Ellison Brown was Ellison’s paternal aunt, born along with her brother Lewis and eight other children to Alfred and Harriet Walker Ellison in Abbeville, South Carolina. Lucretia and the Brown family moved to Oklahoma about the same time as Lewis and Ida Ellison. The Browns lived in West Town, a small Black enclave set apart from the hub of the Black community, on Peach Avenue. Here the Ellison and Brown children often played on summer evenings, and on more than one occasion, after Lewis’ death, Ida would come to find a roof over her head. To Lucretia, or “Aunt Teat,” as well as to his father and the Ellisons, Ralph attributed his humor and Ellisonian pride. Even as a laundress, Lucretia was described as haughty towards her Black patrons as well as her sister-in-law Ida’s more prosperous extended family made up of the likes of the Randolphs and Slaughters. Much of her “bristling hauteur” came from the strength of the Ellison patriarch Alfred, about whom Ellison would later write: “I was impressed that my grandfather was a man of stern principles and of considerable courage—as was illustrated by the account of his refusing to leave Abbeville after one of his friends was lynched…This was strong stuff, admirable stuff—which I could understand because racial violence was no stranger to Oklahoma. Needless to say, I hoped that I had inherited such courage. My aunt liked to recall her father’s strong part patriarchal control of her brothers…On two occasions following my father’s death, Herbert, my younger brother, and I lived with her and her three children, and there were frequent occasions for her to warn us punishment…Lucretia and her children were in fact brought to Oklahoma by my parents and lived with them until my aunt, an excellent laundress—really an artist—was able to set up house for her family. I’m told that her husband, from whom she was by then divorced, was a surveyor.”

Ralph Ellison was fond of his father's sister, Aunt Lucretia Brown, who was Ralph's only connection in Oklahoma City to his father's family after his death when Ralph was a small child. Brown lived in a historically-Black enclave known as West Town. While not as developed as the Black enclave on the northeast side, West Town was a thriving community with its own churches, schools and retail. Ralph and his mother and brother moved into an apartment in the rear of Aunt Lucretia's home in 1924.

Home of Lucretia Brown

Ellison often made the distinction that he grew up in the southwest and not the “deep South,” but Oklahoma City shared with the deep South, Jim Crow, the KKK, lynchings, and segregation. As with amusement parks and zoos, swimming pools were off limits to Black children in the city. For Ellison and his friend Jimmy Stewart, specific locations along the North Canadian River near Stewart’s home in West Town offered an opportunity to cool down during hot, Oklahoma summers. Stewart later described the Sandy Bend section of the river where he and young Ralph used to swim as “Gargoly.” “It was a swimming place, you see…It connected to the river right here in this area. It was the only place that you had in Oklahoma City for Black people to swim. They didn’t allow you to swim at Spring Lake [amusement park] or any other place. Gargoly was a distinct part of the fife of Black kids here in Oklahoma City.”

Prior to the 1930s, the North Canadian River was full of large bends as it flowed through the city, unlike the straightened and controlled channel it is today. One such bend was Sandy Bend which was a loop that had cut itself off from the rest of the river, essentially making it a large circular pond. Sandy Bend was popular among the children in the Black enclave of West Town, including Ralph Ellison and Jimmy Stewart, who were excluded from using segregated swimming pools.

Sandy Bend

While as children, Ralph Ellison and Jimmy Stewart often watched Indians baseball games on the margins of the Western League Baseball Stadium, the grounds themselves were sometimes welcoming to Black children. Ellison, remembering fondly the music programs of Mrs. Zelia Breaux of Douglass school, described the playing field under very different circumstances. "On May Day children from all of the Negro schools were assembled on the playing field of the old Western League baseball stadium, the girls in their white dresses and the boys in blue serge knickers and white shirts, and there to the music of the Douglass High School Band, we competed in wrapping dozens of maypoles and engaged in the mass dancing of a variety of European folk dances. As was to be expected, there were those who found the sight of young Negroes dancing European folk dances absurd, if not comic, but their prejudiced eyes missed the point of this exercise in democratic education. For in learning such dances, we were gaining an appreciation of the backgrounds and cultures of our fellow Americans whose backgrounds lay in Europe. And not only did it narrow the psychological distance between them and ourselves, but we saw learning their dances as an artistic challenge."

Oklahoma City had organized baseball almost from its inception. The Oklahoma City Indians were in the Western League of minor league baseball from 1918-1932, winning the league championship in 1923. Ralph Ellison and Jimmy Stewart often watched Indians baseball games from the vantage of a nearby bluff which overlooked the riverside park.

Western League Baseball Grounds

At five or six years of age, near the time he began to attend Douglass School, Ralph Ellison witnessed not only the boundaries of race in Oklahoma City, but his mother's courageous attempt to scale them. Around 1918, she met resistance when trying to enter the Wheeler Park. Incensed, Ida chose to not return to the zoo; her precocious son Ralph, tried hard to understand. Later remembering parts of the conversation he had with her about why they couldn't return, Ellison explained how he had first asked whether the animals were sick, then turned to other possibilities: "Had someone done something bad to the animals? No. Had someone tried to steal them or feed them poison? No...Could white kids still go?" Apparently badgered by the innocence of such questions, Ida made a fateful decision to make another trip to the zoo. The visit went without incident until a plainclothes guard ask her what white folks she had come with. Her ire raised, Ellison remembered his mother spitting back, "I'm here...because I am a tax-payer, and I thought it was about time that my boys have a look at those animals. And I don't need any white folks to show me the way." Ida Ellison's courage was noticed then and remembered later by her son: "Mama certainly had courage…Do you remember the time she took us out to the zoo and took her time and showed us all of the animals before the cop came up to tell us we had to leave because we were Negroes? She knew that Negroes paid taxes to support the public parks and she meant for us to see the animals, law or no law."

Wheeler Park was once the home of Oklahoma City's zoo until 1923. A municipal zoo, the park was originally open to all people, but became segregated after statehood in 1907. City park commissioners were afraid white attendance would drop-off and cause the streetcar company not to build a line into the park if African Americans were allowed to visit the zoo. Ralph Ellison and his mother made an attempt to challenge the admission rules in 1918 without success.

Ralph Ellison and African American History in Oklahoma City

Ralph Ellison Family's (1916) 314 N. Byers

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources