Douglass, Ellison and Marley lived on racial frontiers. Their interactions with
mixed audiences made them key figures in an interracial consciousness and
culture, integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one group. An
abolitionist who criticized black racialism; the author of Invisible Man, a
landmark of modernity and black literature; a musician whose allegiance was to
"God's side, who cause me to come from black and white." The lives of these
three men illustrate how our notions of "race" have been constructed out of a
repression of the interracial.