One of the stranger documents among Ralph Ellison's published works is the essay ''Tell It Like It Is, Baby,'' which he began writing while in Rome in 1956 but left uncompleted for almost a decade until he published it in the centenary issue of The Nation in 1965. What prompted the essay was a letter to Ellison from a boyhood friend, Virgil Branam, who had written to express outrage at the defiance of southern senators in the face of the US Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In March of 1956 twenty-two US senators from southern states, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, signed and circulated a ''Southern Manifesto,'' in which, among other things, they embraced Plessy v. Ferguson with the claim that the 1896 ruling had become ''a part of the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life.'' The manifesto concluded with the senators vowing to reverse the decision of the US Supreme Court in Brown. Troubled by this open defiance, Branam, one of Ellison's long-time correspondents, wanted to know what sense the famous novelist could make of the events roiling the American scene.