The Invisible Man gets radical

The next stage in the journey of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: after he gives a rousing speech to a crowd gathered in front of a Harlem apartment to protest the eviction of two elderly tenants, the IM flees the police running along rooftops - pursued by someone he thought was a cop but turns out to be a member of a radical-progressive activist group. The guy brings the IM to a party meeting in an expensive East Side apartment, and they agree to hire him to be some kind of speechmaker/rabble rouser - the group is all white and they clearly want to make inroads in Harlem and the black community. There are serious hints of trouble - the hostess worries that the IM may not be black enough, for ex., - and it does strain credulity that they would offer him a job and up front $ knowing almost nothing about him, that they have no black members at all in their group, and in fact that the IM would take such a job, which requires him to take on a new name and identity and sever ties with his family and with anyone he knows in Harlem - though, granted, he seems very isolated from his family and from his community and he desperately needs the $. For his first assignment, they give him a bunch of pamphlets to read, then bring him to the site of a rally, an old Harlem boxing arena, it seems, and keep him backstage, telling him he'll be the last speaker. That's a lot of responsibility to put on a guy on his first day on the job, right? Obviously, Ellison again is examining issues of identity, racial identity, and the need for black independence - her reserves some of his deepest contempt for the white "benefactors," whether the trustees of Tuskegee or the New York activists who think they know what's best for others.