"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-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
- Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
A Young George Washington
A painting of a young George Washington around 25 years of age. The world into which George Washington was born in 1732 was a comfortable one and wholly dependent on the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Washington's ancestors had been practicing slavery in Virgina for almost a century and throughout his young manhood he accepted the institution without question. He was born into a time when slavery was the mores of the old South. Washington owed more than 300 enlaved black men, women and children that provided the labor force required to run his plantation.
