Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy

Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy PDF Author: Finnie D. Coleman
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334809
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
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.

Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy

Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy PDF Author: Finnie D. Coleman
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334809
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

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

Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs PDF Author: Tess Chakkalakal
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820345989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
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.

Imperium in Imperio

Imperium in Imperio PDF Author: Sutton E. Griggs
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
"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.

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt PDF Author: Reginald A. Wilburn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0820705977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
In this comparative and hybrid study, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. Wilburn engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the English tradition. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt contends that early African American authors appropriated and remastered Milton by completing and complicating England’s epic poet of liberty with the intertextual originality of repetitive difference. Wilburn focuses on a diverse array of early African American authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Julia Cooper. He examines the presence of Milton in their works as a reflection of early African Americans’ rhetorical affiliations with the poet’s satanic epic for messianic purposes of freedom and racial uplift. Wilburn explains that early African American authors were attracted to Milton because of his preeminent status in literary tradition, strong Christian convictions, and poetic mastery of the English language. This tripartite ministry makes Milton an especially indispensible intertext for authors whose writings and oratory were sometimes presumed beneath the dignity of criticism. Through close readings of canonical and obscure texts, Wilburn explores how various authors rebelled against such assessments of black intellect by altering Milton’s meanings, themes, and figures beyond orthodox interpretations and imbuing them with hermeneutic shades of interpretive and cultural difference. However they remastered Milton, these artists respected his oeuvre as a sacred yet secular talking book of revolt, freedom, and cultural liberation. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt particularly draws upon recent satanic criticism in Milton studies, placing it in dialogue with methodologies germane to African American literary studies. By exposing the subversive workings of an intertextual Middle Passage in black literacy, Wilburn invites scholars from diverse areas of specialization to traverse within and beyond the cultural veils of racial interpretation and along the color line in literary studies.

Peculiar Whiteness

Peculiar Whiteness PDF Author: Justin Mellette
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496832574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as “white trash” have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., “white trash,” tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of “white trash.”

A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs

A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs PDF Author: John Cullen Gruesser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192856316
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
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 History of the Literature of the U.S. South: Volume 1

A History of the Literature of the U.S. South: Volume 1 PDF Author: Harilaos Stecopoulos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108586511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
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.

River of Hope

River of Hope PDF Author: Elizabeth Gritter
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813144744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
One of the largest southern cities and a hub for the cotton industry, Memphis, Tennessee, was at the forefront of black political empowerment during the Jim Crow era. Compared to other cities in the South, Memphis had an unusually large number of African American voters. Black Memphians sought reform at the ballot box, formed clubs, ran for office, and engaged in voter registration and education activities from the end of the Civil War through the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In this groundbreaking book, Elizabeth Gritter examines how and why black Memphians mobilized politically in the period between Reconstruction and the beginning of the civil rights movement. Gritter illuminates, in particular, the efforts and influence of Robert R. Church Jr., an affluent Republican and founder of the Lincoln League, and the notorious Memphis political boss Edward H. Crump. Using these two men as lenses through which to view African American political engagement, this volume explores how black voters and their leaders both worked with and opposed the white political machine at the ballot box. River of Hope challenges persisting notions of a "Solid South" of white Democratic control by arguing that the small but significant number of black southerners who retained the right to vote had more influence than scholars have heretofore assumed. Gritter's nuanced study presents a fascinating view of the complex nature of political power during the Jim Crow era and provides fresh insight into the efforts of the individuals who laid the foundation for civil rights victories in the 1950s and '60s.

Agrotopias

Agrotopias PDF Author: Abby L. Goode
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469669838
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population. Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture PDF Author: Grégory Pierrot
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354902
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.