Jim Crow, literature, and the legacy of Sutton E. Griggs /

Griggs (1872-1933) was an activist southern Baptist minister who mixed oral and written traditions in his sermons; addressed, through speeches and the written word, the pressing political and social realities facing African Americans; published five novels; and lauded the printed word. Chakkalakal (Bowdoin College) and Warren (Univ. of Chicago) decry the lack of scholarly attention devoted to Griggs. The editors' intent is to move Griggs to the center of African American literary history. The book supports the renewed interest in the literature and culture of the Jim Crow era and seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the literary works and histories that inform the African American literary tradition. Contributors are a diverse group of scholars interested in revising, correcting, and interrogating a literature long maligned as political and/or substandard. In their essays, they explore class warfare, politics and literature, racist misrepresentations in the literature of the time, and questions surrounding Griggs's readership. Among the notable contributions: Andrea Williams's "Moving Up a Dead-End Ladder," John Ernest's "Harnessing the Niagara," and M. Giulia Fabi's "Jim Crow and the House of Fiction." The collection is convincing in establishing the value and legacy of Griggs's work. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. A. S. Newson-Horst Morgan State University

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. Verdict This academic collection reintroduces (along with Finnie D. Coleman's Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy and Randolph Meade Walker's The Metamorphosis of Sutton E. Griggs) the work of an important, influential, and neglected figure in African American letters and social thought and would reward any serious reader interested in literature and the history of race relations in the South at the turn of the 20th century.-Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.