SOURCE: "The Negro in American Fiction," in PHYLON: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, Vol. IV, No. 4, Winter, 1943, pp. 335-45.

During the period of disfranchisement Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, Jr., were outstanding among those Southern writers who abetted anti-Negro legislative action by showing the black man to disadvantage before the American reading public. Page was preeminently the perpetuator of the plantation motif which had received emphasis before the Civil War in the works of such writers as John Pendleton Kennedy, W. A. Carruthers, John Eston Cooke, and James W. Hungerford. In the opinion of Page, the ante-bellum South enshrined the "sweetest, purest, and most beautiful civilization" the nation has ever known; and in such works as In Ole Virginia, or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887), The Old South (1892), and Social Life in Old Virginia (1897) he paints a gorgeous plantation scene peopled by chivalric, benevolent aristocrats and contented, doting slaves. But Page was more than the retrospective romancer of a vanished feudal society: he was also the ardent sponsor of a reconstructed South in which the Negro would be kept in a subordinate position. In this latter capacity he helped to expedite disfranchisement and other legalized handicaps applied to freedmen. His novel Red Rock (1898), for example, is chiefly an apotheosis of Southern bluebloods and a disparagement of scalawags, carpetbaggers, Negro politicians and Northern missionaries. A more forthright statement of his racial attitude, however, is given in "The Negro Question," an essay in which he, after marshaling arguments to prove the backwardness and inferiority of the black man, states

These examples cited, if they establish anything, establish the fact that the Negro race does not possess, in any development which he has yet attained, the elements of character, the essential qualifications to conduct a government, even for himself; and that if the reins of government be intrusted to his unaided hands, he will fling reason to the winds and drive to ruin.¹

Though demanding Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Page at least approved educated Negroes who "knew their place," and never attempted to exculpate the Ku Klux Klan of all guilt for lawlessness. On the other hand, Dixon voiced the very epitome of Negrophobia in two novels which he describes as follows

. . . . The Leopard's Spots was the statement in historical outline of the conditions from the enfranchisement of the Negro to his disfranchisement.

The Clansman develops the true story of the "Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy," which overturned the Reconstruction régime.²

As a matter of fact, neither of the two works is a realistic rendering of history. Betraying its incendiary sensationalism by such chapter titles as "A Thousand-Legged Beast" and "The Black Peril," The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (1902) is mainly concerned with complimenting the slaveholding landlords; attacking the carpetbaggers, scalawags, Freedmen's Bureau, Northern missionaries, and Negro politicians and intellectuals; ridiculing Yankees whose liberal racial theories do not obtain in actual social situations; establishing the Negro as a degenerate, inferior, irresponsible, bestial creature, "transformed by the exigency of war from a chattel to be bought and sold into a possible beast to be feared and guarded";³ decrying intermarriage because it would destroy through Africanization the racial integrity of the Anglo-Saxon; and extolling the Invisible Empire as the defender of the weak, the expeller of thieves and parasites, the preserver of Aryan culture, and "the old answer of organized manhood to organized crime."⁴ The eulogy of the Invisible Empire is continued in The Clansman; An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), dedicated to the author's uncle, a former Grand Titan of the hooded order, and converted in 1916 by D. W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation, one of the most popular and inflammatory box-office attractions in the history of the American motion picture industry.

Aroused by the literary libels of the schools of Page and Dixon as well as by political, social, and economic discrimination and persecution, Negro authors undertook to offset the misrepresentations of Southern propagandists by defending and glorifying the black man. Among the Negro fictionists of the fin de siécle and of the first decade of the present century, who participated in this campaign of racial apology and extollrnent were Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, J. McHenry Jones, Pauline E. Hopkins, Charles Henry Fowler, G. Langhorne Pryor, George Marion McClellan, J. W. Grant, and Sutton E. Griggs. In this group Griggs was outstanding because of his productivity and influence.

The author of five race-motivated novels—Imperium in Imperio (1899), Overshadowed (1901), Unfettered (1902), The Hindered Hand (1905), and Pointing the Way (1908)—Griggs not only operated his own publishing company but also, during his travels as a prominent minister and orator, promoted an extensive sale of his works among the black masses of the country. Though virtually unknown to white American readers, his novels were probably more popular among the rank and file of Negroes than the fiction of Chesnutt and Dunbar. Militant and assertive, Griggs chronicled the passing of the servile black man and hailed the advent of the intellectually emancipated Negro

The cringing, fawning, sniffling, cowardly Negro which slavery left, had disappeared, and a new Negro, self-respecting, fearless and determined in the assertion of his rights, was at hand.⁵

In view of Griggs' active literary career and forthright demands for racial justice, it is somewhat surprising that but one historian of twentieth century Negro literature⁶ has mentioned his work as a novelist and that no scholar in this field has treated at length the significance of his contribution.

Griggs' first novel, Imperium in Imperio, is a fantastic account of a national Negro political organization. The main characters are dark-skinned Belton Piedmont and mulatto Bernard Belgrave, graduates of Stowe (Roger Williams?) and Harvard universities respectively. Invited by Piedmont, Fairfax joins the Imperium in Imperio, an agency secretly formed "to unite all Negroes in a body to do that which the whimpering government childishly but truthfully" said it could not do. Elected president of the Imperium, Fairfax urges the open revolt of the Negro and proposes a demand for the surrender of Texas and Louisiana, the former to be retained and the latter to be ceded to foreign allies in return for aid. Opposing Fairfax, Piedmont advocates that Negroes voluntarily segregate themselves in Texas to work out their destiny. The Imperium adopts Fairfax's plan and offers Piedmont a choice between cooperation and death. At the expiration of his time limit Piedmont offers himself to be shot, and Griggs asks

When will all races and classes of men learn that men made in the image of God will not be the slaves of another image?⁷

Though weakened by melodramatic situations, idealized characters, and stilted conversation, Imperium in Imperio is the first American Negro novel with a strictly political emphasis. Besides exposing miscegenation, oppression, and Jim-Crowism, it attacks the exploitation of the black man in American politics and stresses the need for an agency to protect Negro interests not safeguarded by the government. While extravagant in conception, Imperium in Imperio exhibits the racial outlook that produced the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other organizations striving for the full participation of the Negro in American democracy.

In Overshadowed, his second novel, Griggs surveys the national scene with a feeling of futility. In the preface he foresees a hard road ahead for the Negro, "whose grandfather was a savage and whose father was a slave," in a social order evolved and dominated by the Anglo-Saxon. With Richmond, Virginia, as its main background, Overshadowed traces the love of Erma Wysong and Astral Herndon. While Herndon is in college, John Benson Lawson, an ex-governor's son, engages Dolly Smith to procure Erma as a mistress. Unknown to young Lawson is the fact that Dolly is the sister of Erma's mother, the unfortunate victim of an earlier liaison with his father. To obtain revenge, Dolly eventually brings young Lawson to court, where she makes public the illicit affairs of the father and son. As a result of the trial, the ex-governor loses his mind, Dolly is tarred and feathered, and young Lawson receives a jail sentence. Later Herndon and Erma, having married and become the parents of a boy, are surprised one winter night by the coming of Erma's brother John, who had been placed in the chaingang for the murder of a master workman who insisted that labor unions bar Negroes. Soon after his arrival John dies of exposure, and Erma quickly succumbs to shock and grief. A white friend subsequently advises the grieved husband that the adoption of a Booker T. Washington racial philosophy would ease his burden

Your status here is but due to conditions inherent in the situation. Why not bow to the inevitable, accept conditions as you find them, extract from life as much good as can come from well-directed efforts, and beyond this point have no yearnings? Develop character, earn money, contribute to the industrial development of the country, exercise your wonderful capacity for humility, move continuously in the line of least resistance and, somehow, ail will be well.⁸

Rejecting this counsel and later discarding the idea of emigration to Africa because "it, too, is overshadowed," Herndon buries his wife in mid-ocean, where "there abides no social group in which conditions operate toward the overshadowing of such elements as are not deemed assimilable."⁹

The thesis of Overshadowed is that the Negro must face a racial handicap in all parts of the world and particularly in the United States and Africa. Attention is focused, however, upon the American scene, where miscegenation causes the death of Erma and her mother, the suicide of Dolly, the insanity of ex-Governor Lawson, the imprisonment of his son John, and the loss of Herndon's wife and mother. The novel also exposes the instability of Negro employment, the exclusion of the Negro by labor unions, and the maladministration of justice in Southern courts. Especially interesting is the subtle attack upon the racial platform of Booker T. Washington. It is after an optimistic speech by Washington, for example, that Erma persuades her brother to make a confession which eventually results in his miserable death. A further veiled thrust at the Tuskegee educator's program is made when Herndon rejects Washingtonian arguments for remaining in America and severs relations with all lands in which the Negro is oppressed. Generally speaking, Overshadowed paints a gloomy picture of Southern racial difficulties and offers slight prospect for adjustment in the immediate future.

"It is the aim of Unfettered," states Griggs in an introductory note to his third novel, "to lead the reader into the inner life of the Negro race and lay bare the aspirations that are fructifying there."¹⁰ The action opens with the death of a Tennessee plantation owner who leaves the bulk of his wealth to a nephew, Lemuel Dalton, but at the same time provides liberally for an old Negro nurse and a beautiful mulatto girl named Morlene. After dispossessing the colored beneficiaries of his uncle's will, Lemuel almost provokes a riot by wounding Harry Dalton, a young Negro who had overcome him some years earlier. Concluding that formal training had caused Harry and his sister Beulah to assume social equality and "that the only safe education for the Negro was the education that taught him better to work," angered whites drive the pair out of the community and thereby cause a mass exodus of black folk. Later Beulah, believed to be the inciter of the migration, is killed during an attack by a group of young white men. In order to avoid further bloodshed, the whites draft as a mediator a Negro school teacher, a typical representative of the professional man whom Griggs calls perhaps "the greatest conservator of peace in the South, laboring for the Negroes by the appointment of the whites, being thus placed in a position where it was to his interest to keep on good terms with both races."¹¹ After reluctantly marrying Harry, Morlene goes with him to a nearby city, where she meets Dorian Warthell, a successful Negro politician who is at once attracted by her unusual beauty. Warthell, who is at odds with the Republican Party, aims to use the Negro vote to force the United States to grant ultimate liberty to the Philippine Islands. Angered by Warthell's intention, a treacherous congressman engaged Harry to take the Negro politician's life; but Morlene overhears the plot, warns the intended victim, and deserts her husband. Left by his wife and repudiated by right-thinking Republicans, Harry sacrifices himself to save the lives of a woman and her children. Thereupon Warthell proposes to Morlene, who promises to consent if he will outline a plan which will unfetter the mind of the Negro and enable the two races to live together in peace and amity. When Warthell submits his project, entitled "Dorian's Plan," Morlene immediately agrees to become his wife. Meanwhile Lemuel's young Northern bride, who has been taught by her husband to hate and fear the Negro, becomes so hysterically frightened upon seeing a colored boy that she suffers a fatal fall from horseback. Painfully aware of the dire effects of misinstructing his wife, Lemuel realizes that interracial good-will is necessary for the happiness and welfare of both groups in the South.

Like Overshadowed, Unfettered provides a dismal picture of race relations. The opposition of prejudiced Southern whites to the education of the Negro is set forth, and an analysis is made of the motives underlying intimidation and segregation. Especially interesting are the political views of Warthell, who, though distrustful of the Democrats because their "chief tenets are the white man's supremacy and exclusiveness in government," nevertheless recognizes no unseverable party ties. In his advocacy of the liberation of the Philippines, moreover, Warthell manifests a world-wide as well as a national concern for the advancement of darker races.

As a statement of racial policy, however, the most important section of Unfettered is the appended essay called "Dorian's Plan: Sequel to Unfettered: A Dissertation on the Race Problem."¹² This essay, which is a serious approach to the problem of racial adjustment in the United States, points out that the major task is to institute merit and not color as the standard of preferment. Since the oppression of the Negro stems from unfortunate circumstances of the past, the race is urged to "meet and combat the timorous conservatism that has hitherto impeded our progress." The Negro is advised not to rely wholly upon the Republican Party. Listed as necessary in the task of preparing the race for a better future are character development, worthy home life, public school education for the masses, technological institutions for the training of industrial workers, and universities for the development of "men capable of interpreting and influencing world movements, men able to adjust the race to any new conditions that may arise." Land ownership and a back-to-the-farm movement are recommended. Good government and simple justice, not race supremacy and partisan patronage, are defined as the desirable goals of Negro political action. The cultivation of the friendship of the white South as well as of the moral support of other sections of the country and of other civilized nations is also emphasized as a sine qua non of enlightened racial policy. In the promotion of this program the support of the orator, journalist, literary artist, painter, sculptor, and composer is solicited. As a statement of desirable procedure for the colored people of the United States, "Dorian's Plan" is a forerunner of James Weldon Johnson's Negro Americans, What Now? (1934) and numerous other guides to interracial harmony in the United States.

In his next novel, The Hindered Hand, Griggs explores the tragic results of miscegenation in the South and attacks the biased portrayal of the Negro in Dixon's The Leopard's Spots. The tragedy sometimes caused by interbreeding is shown in the lives of a mulatto couple's three children—Tiara Merlow, who, because of her dark complexion, is early separated from her family in order to make "passing" easier for her parents and the other two children; the Reverend Percy G. Marshall, who is killed by a Negro when seen holding his sister Tiara in his arms; and Eunice Seabright, who, after being forced into an unhappy marriage with a white man, becomes demented when her racial identity is revealed. Concerning Eunice's insanity a Northern specialist says

The one specific cause of her breakdown is the Southern situation which has borne tremendously upon her. That whole region of the country is affected by a sort of sociological hysteria, and we physicians are expecting more and more pathological manifestations as a result of the strain upon the people.¹³

The effect of American caste upon the Negro is considered in Tiara's defense of her mother:

My mother is dead and paid dearly for her unnatural course. But do not judge her too harshly. You people who are white do not know what an awful burden it is to be black in these days of the world. If some break down beneath the awful load of caste which you thrust upon them, mingle pity with your blame.¹⁴

The maladministration of justice in the South is mirrored in the unwarranted lynching of Foresta Crump and Bud Harper in Mississippi. An investigator, upon asking a white native whether mob action against the Negro couple was caused by "the one crime," receives the following explanation

That's all rot about one crime. We lynch niggers down here for anything. We lynch them for being sassy and sometimes lynch them on general principles. The truth of the matter is the real "one crime" that paves the way for a lynching whenever we have the notion, is the crime of being black.¹⁵

At a subsequent trial of the lynchers a young prosecuting attorney becomes a political outcast for demanding justice, and the jury sets the mobbers free.

In the first and second editions of The Hindered Hand, a review of Dixon's The Leopard's Spots appears in the form of a conversation between two of the characters of the novel, but in the third edition this discussion in amplified in a review at the end of the book. Even in the third edition, however, The Leopard's Spots is mentioned in the body of the novel when A. Hostility, in a fruitless effort to enlist Negro aid in a Slav movement against the Anglo-Saxon, calls the attention of Tiara's lover, Ensal Ellwood, "to the book written for the express purpose of thoroughly discrediting the Negro race in America."¹⁶ Ellwood is disturbed by the literary campaign against the Negro

Ensal thought of the odds against the Negro in this literary battle: how that Southern white people, being more extensive purchasers of books than Negroes, would have the natural bias of the great publishing agencies on their side; how that Northern white people, resident in the South, for social and business reasons, might hesitate to father books not in keeping with the prevailing sentiment of Southern white people; how that residents of the North, who essayed to write in defense of the Negro, were laughed out of school as mere theorists ignorant of actual conditions; and, finally, how that a lack of leisure and the absence of general culture handicapped the Negro in fighting his own battle in this species of warfare.¹⁷

In "A Hindering Hand, Supplementary to The Hindered Hand: A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr.,"¹⁸ Griggs states that Dixon's malice derives from the traditional dislike of the Southern poor white for the Negro and that his purpose is to effect the expulsion of those having African blood from the United States. To accomplish this aim, according to Griggs, Dixon attempts "to thoroughly discredit the Negroes, to stir up the baser passions of men against them, and to send them forth with a load of obloquy and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over, sufficient to appall a nation of angels." Among the propagandistic techniques allegedly used by Dixon are the depiction of the Negro as the lustful despoiler of white womankind, the portrayal of degenerates as representative types of black men, and the attribution of natural inferiority to those of African extraction. In consideration of Dixon's methods and materials, Griggs submits the following epitaph for the author of The Leopard's Spots

This misguided soul ignored all of the good in the aspiring Negro; made every vicious offshoot that he pictured typical of the entire race; presented all mistakes independent of their environments and provocations; ignored or minimized all the evil in the more vicious elements of whites; said and did all things which he deemed necessary to leave behind him the greatest heritage of hatred the world has ever known. Humanity claims him not as one of her children.¹⁹

Though weak according to artistic standards, The Hindered Hand is the most elaborate attack upon Thomas Dixon in American Negro fiction. In addition, the book presents the well-worn themes of miscegenation and racial injustice, and shows the Negro mind weighing open revolt and emigration to Africa²⁰ against bearing the burdens of an ethnic minority in the United States. The denial of political rights is designated as the chief factor which "causes the Ethiopian in America to feel that his is indeed 'The Hindered Hand.'"²¹

Like The Hindered Hand, Pointing the Way treats interbreeding and politics in the South, but ends upon a more hopeful note. Letitia Gilbreath, spinster daughter of a white man and his ex-slave mistress, considers it "a shocking crime for two dark persons to marry each other" and therefore undertakes to compel her niece Clotille to become the wife of Baug Peppers, a mulatto lawyer. Clotille, however, loves Conroe Driscoll, her darkskinned college sweetheart, and, while studying in Boston, invites Eina, a beautiful English-Spanish-Indian girl, to her Southern home in Belrose with the hope that the visitor would marry Peppers and thus leave her free to wed the young man of her choice. After reaching Belrose, Eina becomes seriously interested in Peppers; but Seth Molair, a white attorney who admires the attractive newcomer, warns her that "to work, to eat, to sleep, to die is the utmost programme that organized society in the South offers" the Negro, and informs her that she may not mingle socially with both races

... . In the South social freedom is not permitted, for reasons that I need not discuss here. Whoever affiliates socially with the one race in the South is denied the social life of the other.²²

After Eina asks whether there is any hope for interracial harmony, Molair replies

The one thing needed in the South is political cooperation between the better elements of whites and the Negroes, but the manner of the coming of emancipation, enfranchisement, and elevation to high public station seems to have riveted the Negro into one party, while the terror of being ruled by an alien and backward race has chained the real strength of the white race into an opposing party. .. . As long as there is a bitter political war between the Negroes and the whites of the South, how can conditions change?²³

Resolving to bring about better race relations in Belrose and definitely aligning herself with the Negro group, Eina persuades Peppers to ask Molair to run for mayor on a platform pledging justice to all citizens. Moved by the ruthless murder of a colored youth by a white chaingang guard, Molair enters the race and wins the election. His impartial and progressive administration, during which Driscoll becomes a captain in the municipal fire department, not only draws national attention and presidential commendation, but also elicits the enthusiastic interest and financial support of a millionaire ex-Southerner who oposes the steady northward migration of Negroes and resolves to improve the status of the blacks and poor whites of the South. Successful in her campaign for better race relations in Belrose, Eina induces Peppers to test Southern disfranchising legislation before the Supreme Court. Assisted by a bequest from Letitia, who earlier died in a fire in which Driscoll made a fatal effort to save her life, Peppers carries a test case to the highest tribunal in the land and makes an eloquent plea for the enfranchisement of his people. The novel closes with praise of the Belrose experiment and with the marriage of Peppers and Eina.

Pointing the Way emphasizes the tragic consequences of intra-racial prejudice by showing how the happiness of lovers is thwarted through the efforts of a color-conscious old maid to force her niece to marry a mulatto. The novel also seeks to show that the political cooperation of the races in the South not only contributes to the solution of the problems of that section but also to the general improvement of conditions throughout the country. While deficient according to standards of art, Pointing the Way adds to Griggs' reputation as a political propagandist in fiction.

At this place it might be well to draw a few comparisons between Griggs and his well-known contemporary, Charles W. Chesnutt. To begin, both employ the conventional subject-matter of miscegenation, color prejudice, and racial oppression. Unlike Chesnutt, however, Griggs recommends a way to a better life for his people. Rejecting open revolt, exodus to Africa, and the program of Booker T. Washington, he offers the solution of political cooperation with the white South and alignment with whatever party offers the Negro the fullest participation in government. Unlike Chesnutt again, Griggs tends to glorify black pigmentation, as the following description of Warthell, the hero of Unfettered, indicates: "As to color he was black, but even those prejudiced to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo."²⁴ While ridiculing the color line within the race in several of his works, Chesnutt nevertheless shows a predilection for mulattoes and occasionally uses certain black stereotypes which most of his Negro contemporaries disdained. As an artist, however, Chesnutt is the superior in every way, for weaknesses in plot, characterization, and diction loom obtrusively in the novels of Griggs.

But regardless of his failings as an artist, Griggs is a significant pioneer in the history of American Negro fiction. Like Oscar Michaux and J. A. Rogers today, he personally distributed his books among the masses of his people. In his novels he shows the advantages of racial organization as a technique for gaining the full benefits of American democracy, answers the writers who belittled and vilified the Negro before the national reading public, points unerringly to the distorting influence of prejudice and discrimination upon members of both races, and manifests a deep humanitarian interest in the welfare of oppressed peoples in other parts of the world. Most important of all, he is one of the earliest symbols in American Negro fiction of the spiritual emancipation of his people and the first important author of the political novel among his race in this country.

NOTES

¹The Old South, p. 324.

²The Clansman, p. v.

³The Leopard's Spots, p. 5.

⁴Ibid., pp. 150-151.

⁵Imperium in Imperio, p. 62.

⁶ Sterling Brown in The Negro in American Fiction (1937), pp. 100-101. Professor Brown briefly discusses Unfettered and The Hindered Hand, two of Griggs' five novels.

⁷Imperium in Imperio, p. 252.

⁸Overshadowed, p. 215.

⁹Ibid., p. 217.

¹⁰Unfettered, p. 5.

¹¹Ibid., p. 56.

¹²Ibid., pp. 217-276.

¹³The Hindered Hand, or The Reign of the Repressionist, p. 249.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 238.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 136.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 206.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 207.

¹⁸ [In the essay], Griggs states that he does not intend "to deal with Mr. Dixon's second book [The Clansman] bearing on the race problem, it being the hope of the writer to give that matter serious and independent attention." Ibid., p. 298. This investigator has found no record of such a study of The Clansman by Griggs.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 332.

²⁰ In appended "Notes to the Serious," Griggs, somewhat anticipating Marcus Garvey, declares that the idea of a Negro exodus to Africa is his own dream and not the wish of most American Negroes:

The overwhelmingly predominant sentiment of the American Negroes is to fight out their battle on these shores. The assigning of the thoughts of the race to the uplift of Africa, as affecting the situation in America, must be taken more as a dream of the author than as representing any considerable responsible sentiment within the race, which, as has been stated, seems at present thoroughly and unqualifiedly American, a fact that must never be overlooked by those seeking to deal with this grave question in a practical manner. Ibid., p. 297.

²¹Ibid., p. 292.

²²Pointing the Way, p. 26.

²³Ibid., p. 41.

²⁴Unfettered, op. cit., p. 71.