Sutton

1905 · ref. 140947909 — Nashville TN: The Orion Publishing Company 1905. First edition. First edition first printing. Presentation copy signed by Sutton E. Griggs on the front free endpaper and inscribed to the Caucasian Presbyterian minister Dr. Hughes O. Gibbons "with the compliments of the author." 303 5 pp. including five pages at rear advertising author's other works. Bound in publisher's maroon cloth stamped in silver and gold. About Good with heavy wear and rubbing to covers mottling to cloth staining to textblock edges and bumping to upper corners affecting textblock throughout. Front hinge broken rear hinge cracked binding shaken. A signed copy of a significant book. Sutton E. Griggs was a Black Baptist minister and novelist who spoke out against racial injustice more fervently than many of his contemporaries. He wrote and self-published five novels all of which were intended to counter the white supremacist writings of Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page. The academic Hugh M. Gloster wrote in 1943: "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 Hindered Hand written in direct response to Dixon's The Leopard's Spots chronicles the fate of a mixed-race family and addresses numerous national and international issues. A graphic lynching scene based on actual events depicts the torture and immolation of a Black couple. The novel ends with two characters departing for Africa followed by the five-page appendix "Notes for the Serious." A call to action and celebration of achievement the book is a forerunner to the Black Power movement that emerged decades later. Gloster again now president of Morehouse College and writing in 1969 "American Negroes who espouse black beauty black pride black militancy and black separatism are ideological successors of Dr. Sutton E. Griggs. The Orion Publishing Company unknown