Asserting that slavery had eradicated African-American consciousness, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan concluded as late as 1963, "The Negro is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect."26 It followed, other whites believed, that whites could ignore what blacks did and thought. This is what Ralph Ellison lamented in labeling his novel Invisible Man (1952) and what James Baldwin later meant by entitling a collection of his essays Nobody Knows My Name (1961). To be ignored was as bad as to be oppressed—maybe worse.
