Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was a significant African American social reformer, pastor, and prolific writer. His successful first novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899), addressed in a forceful way the plight of Black Americans in post-Reconstruction America. Using Griggs's life story as a platform, Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle against White Supremacy explores how conservative pragmatism shaped the dynamics of race relations and racial politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More precisely, the book examines the various intellectual tactics that Griggs developed to combat white supremacy. Author Finnie D. Coleman shows that Griggs was a pivotal shaper of a racial uplift philosophy that bore little relationship to more melioristic attempts at racial reconciliation. Coleman explores how Griggs's family-particularly his father-influenced his political ideology. Coleman examines why and how Griggs toyed with militant and at times violent fictional responses to white supremacy when his background and temperament were profoundly conservative and peaceful. Ultimately, Griggs yielded to his father's brand of pragmatic conservatism, but not before he produced a number of works of fiction and nonfiction that pushed the boundaries of what were acceptable reactions to the racial status quo of his day. The author addresses other questions about Griggs's work: How did his fiction capture the generational differences between African Americans born in antebellum America and those who came of age at the end of the Gilded Age? Which rhetorical conventions proved effective against the ever-obdurate Jim Crow? Why have critical assessments of his works varied so greatly over the years? Most important, when compared with other writings of his day, why have his texts been so thoroughly marginalized? This new volume adds to our understanding of Griggs's literary career and his role as one of the most widely read and selflessly dedicated intellectual leaders of his day.

"Imperium In Imperio" is a turn of a century novel which envisages what kind of leadership the Black Civil Rights Movement ought to have–one that is radical and seizes control of the government or the other which stresses on assimilation? Published in 1899 the novel proposed the radical idea of a secret underground group of radicals that is debating these issues. The faces of these two widely disparate ways are two friends–Bernard Belgrave, the proponent of militancy and Belton Piedmont, the pacifist. But what will happen when these two ideologies collide? Can their utopian ideals sustain in the face of reality? Or will their worlds descend into the chaos of a political dystopia? The novel still raises pertinent questions about the issues of Black leadership in present day America and contrary to popular belief, does not provide an easy answer! Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872-1933) was an African-American author, Baptist minister, social activist and founder of the first black newspaper and high school in Texas.

Imperium in Imperio (1899) was the first black novel to countenance openly the possibility of organized black violence against Jim Crow segregation. Its author, a Baptist minister and newspaper editor from Texas, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933), would go on to publish four more novels; establish his own publishing company, one of the first secular publishing houses owned and operated by an African American in the United States; and help to found the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Tennessee. Alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Griggs was a key political and literary voice for black education and political rights and against Jim Crow. Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs examines the wide scope of Griggs's influence on African American literature and politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Contributors engage Griggs's five novels and his numerous works of nonfiction, as well as his publishing and religious careers. By taking up Griggs's work, these essays open up a new historical perspective on African American literature and the terms that continue to shape American political thought and culture.

Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churches in three Southern states and played a leading role in the influential but understudied National Baptist Convention. Until recently, little was known about the personal and professional life of this religious and community leader. Thus, critics could only contextualize his literary texts to a limited degree and were forced to speculate about how he published them. This literary biography, the first written about the author, draws extensively on primary sources and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, local and national, African American and white. A very different Sutton Griggs emerges from these materials--a dynamic figure who devoted himself to literature for a longer period and to a more profound extent than has ever been previously imagined but also someone who frequently found himself embroiled in controversy because of what he said in his writings and the means he used to publish them. The book challenges currently held notions about the audience for, and the content, production, and dissemination of politically engaged US black fiction, altering the perception of the African American literature and print culture of the period.

A fierce national outcry for righteously waging war has long dominated American culture. From at least the wildly popular Spanish-American War and the US military invasion of the Philippines that infuriated Mark Twain, right up to the current Global War on Terrorism, this is a deadly, dark current coursing throughout American history. Meanwhile, dissenting analyses of the “patriotic gore” have until recently been paid scant attention in the popular media. Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which “the compulsive redeployment of innocence” in the launching, cheering, and retelling of America’s wars “endlessly defers a national reckoning,” as the editors astutely state in their introduction. The works in this collection reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed.

Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction. In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois. The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.

A History of the Literature of the U.S. South provides scholars with a dynamic and heterogeneous examination of southern writing from John Smith to Natasha Trethewey. Eschewing a master narrative limited to predictable authors and titles, the anthology adopts a variegated approach that emphasizes the cultural and political tensions crucial to the making of this regional literature. Certain chapters focus on major white writers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Cormac McCarthy), but a substantial portion of the work foregrounds the achievements of African American writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sarah Wright to address the multiracial and transnational dimensions of this literary formation. Theoretically informed and historically aware, the volume's contributors collectively demonstrate how southern literature constitutes an aesthetic, cultural and political field that richly repays examination from a variety of critical perspectives.