Sutton E. Griggs

Imperium in Imperio: a Study of the Negro Race Problem (Dodo Press) Sutton E. Griggs

Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872-1933) was an African American author, Baptist minister, and social activist. He is best known for his novel Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem, a utopian work that envisions a separate African American state within the United States. Sutton Griggs attended Bishop College in Marshall, Texas and Richmond Theological Seminary. Upon graduation, he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Berkley, Virginia. Griggs was a prolific author, writing more than a dozen books in his lifetime and selling them door-to-door or at the revival meetings at which he preached. Griggs's careers in both the church and social welfare sphere were active and itinerant. In Houston, he helped establish the National Civil and Religious Institute. In 1914, he founded the National Public Welfare League. From 1925 to 1926, he served as president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary, which his father helped found. The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist, written in 1905 as a direct reply to Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, contains graphic accounts of sexual violence and lynching, and was among the most popular African American novels of the period.