At the turn of the twentieth century, when state legislatures across the U.S. South had determined that the solution to the nation’s so-called Negro Problem was to exile black Americans from the region’s political life, the Baptist minister Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872–1933) embarked on a novel-writing career that was at once typical of and singular among early African American writers. Already a successful Baptist minister, Griggs turned to fiction writing with alacrity and in the brief span of less than a decade produced five novels that chronicled the challenges facing black Americans in the South and protested the region’s...

The first of these slogans graces a banner described in the “Plan de San Diego”— the fifteen-step revolutionary plan written in 1915 by an anonymous group of Mexican American and Mexican revolutionaries in South Texas who purportedly had the backing of Germany and Japan in their plan to reclaim the lands taken by the United States in 1846, establish an independent Negro and Native American republic, and put to death every “North American over 16 years of age” except women, children, and aged men. The banner was the emblem of the “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples,” an army that...

One of the most notable developments in twenty-first-century scholarship, the movement away from U.S.-centered approaches to America, enables scholars to cross disciplinary boundaries, make connections among texts heretofore associated with discrete national literatures or regional area studies, and delineate the global forces operating in literary texts. Such a critical methodology is especially appropriate for U.S. black writing, particularly those texts published at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when the country vigorously pursued an imperialist agenda and acquired an overseas empire.¹ In the late 1800s and early 1900s, white imperialists and white anti-imperialists...

Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country” (1863) was arguably the most widely read short story in the United States from 1863 to 1945; Sutton Griggs’s first two novels, Imperium in Imperio (1899) and Overshadowed (1901), the second of which was self-published, were barely noticed at the time of their publication. This chapter examines intertextual connections between Hale’s popular short story and Griggs’s first two novels, focusing on the authors’ narrative figurations of nation (or country) in relation to debates on race, patriotism, and imperialism. In his first two novels, Griggs, I suggest, honors, revises, and recuperates Hale’s phenomenally...

In Sutton Griggs’s second novel, Overshadowed (1901), black Americans face tragic outcomes when they threaten existing class hierarchies. In fact, nearly every ambitious, upwardly mobile black American in the novel meets what might be called a “dead end”: whether physical demise or the more figurative social death of silencing, exile, and marginalization that signals characters’ expulsion from the novel’s fictional world. In this way, though Overshadowed shares with Griggs’s other four novels a focus on challenging Jim Crow racism, Overshadowed more specifically emphasizes how racism operates by limiting black Americans’ economic opportunities. Still, despite the dismal fates that several black...

Of the five academic disciplines Griggs references in his definition of the Science of Collective Efficiency, I am most interested in theories and ideas he selects from sociology and history and how he uses them to illuminate the contemporary events and issues that dominate his fiction.¹ It is noteworthy that Griggs does not mention religion or religious studies as one of the disciplines that inform his “science.” Understanding that Griggs was a seminary-trained Baptist minister from a prominent religious family, we are left to speculate about why he does not include his religious training as an important influence in his...

Part autobiography, part sales pitch, Sutton E. Griggs’s The Story of My Struggles (1914) recounts the challenges faced by an African American author during the Jim Crow era. These challenges were not only the result of discrimination in a publishing industry committed to promoting the work of popular white supremacist writers. In The Story, Griggs “shifts the blame” for his lack of success as an author to his fellow African Americans, who did not support him in his risky literary enterprise. Though his books were advertised in several newspapers, Griggs describes his disappointment at the poor sales of his first...

Published in 1905 as his fourth novel, Sutton E. Griggs’s The Hindered Hand can be and has been read as an African American reply to The Leopard’s Spots (1902) by Thomas Dixon, perhaps the major literary voice for white supremacy at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the office of the Hindered Hand’s protagonist, Ensal Ellwood, Mr. A. Hostility, a white fanatic, comes across the book “of a rather conspicuous Southern man” whose purpose it is to discredit the African American race.¹ The reference to Dixon’s novel is so obvious that Griggs does not even bother to spell it...

As events heat to their expected boil in The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist, Sutton Griggs has his moderate protagonist, Ensal, turn to writing in hopes of lowering the heat while still effecting cultural change. Ensal’s militant friend, Earl, is planning armed conflict, a direct confrontation with white supremacist forces aimed at pressing the issues so long repressed by the racist protocols of the day. “Going to his desk,” Griggs writes, Ensal procures “a rather bulky document” into which “he had cast all of his soul. Upon it he was relying for the amelioration of conditions to...

In this essay I offer a comparative analysis of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905) and Sutton E. Griggs’s Pointing the Way (1908), the least appreciated and least critically analyzed works of two of the most prolific black novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century. These novels have rarely been examined in relation to each other. Yet they do not simply share a close chronological proximity and related topical concerns (including disenfranchisement, the neoslavery of segregation, and the convict-lease system). Rather, Pointing the Way is a deliberate, systematic, illuminating revision of Chesnutt’s earlier novel, and reading these works...

If we credit at all the account of Sutton E. Griggs’s literary career provided in his brief autobiographical sketch The Story of My Struggles, it is difficult to see why Griggs’s fifth and final novel, Pointing the Way, was written at all. His fourth novel, The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905), had been the crowning failure in a series of failed attempts to reach a popular black audience through his fiction writing. Griggs had undertaken The Hindered Hand with great expectations for its critical, financial, and political success because it seemed to be a work destined...