Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs

Editors Chakkalakal (Africana studies & English, Bowdoin Coll.; Novel Bondage) and Warren (Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, English, Univ. of Chicago; What Was African American Literature??) here collect ten essays that chronologically examine the life, work, and legacy of African American writer, Baptist minister, newspaper editor, political and civil rights activist, and son of a former slave Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872–1933). Perhaps not as widely known as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, or many other African American intellectuals and writers who challenged the social status quo, Griggs wrote five novels in less than a decade—beginning with Imperium in Imperio in 1899—that were among the first to take head-on issues of race and violence in the Jim Crow South. The editors write in their painstaking biographical and contextual introduction that Griggs is impossible to ignore.