The Revolutionary Black Novels of Martin R. Delany and Sutton Griggs

Abstract

From the outset of the Black experience in America there has existed a plethora of interpretations of what role blacks do have in the operation and values of the country, as well as of how blacks should respond to the country and its laws and institutions-and ambivalence has always prevailed. The early arguments (white initiated, but, in part, black endorsed) ran: slavery is not the best of conditions, and it is, indeed, trying to be considered a cipher in the eyes of both social convention and the law, but there is an opportunity to have a religious experience [read: Christian experience] which otherwise would be lacking in black lives. It never was a good argument, of course, and it broke down for most people, black and white, who could think at all by the turn of the nineteenth century. But later a more perplexing ambivalence emerged-made more perplexing by the fact that, following Emancipation, blacks did seem to have some options-oppression (social, political, economic, and legal) on one hand, as against the promise (and occasional actuality) of opportunity in all of those areas, on the other. Was open revolt still called for? If so, to what specific end? Or should America and her various corruptions simply be abandoned? If so, in favor of what new geographical location? Or was perpetual in-house agitation against injustice the most practical course of action? Obviously, given the relatively few revolts and the relatively few blacks who have abandoned America-historically, most black Americans have chosen this last option. It is probably equally accurate to say, however, that many of the best black minds have argued, with conviction and logic, the wisdom of the other positions. Two such thinkers and writers were Martin R. Delany, a physician and social theorist, and Sutton Griggs, a Baptist minister and race lecturer. What these men have in common is that they wrote the only two revolutionary novels written by black Americans in the nineteenth century, Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (published serially, intermittently, between 1859 and 1862), and Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899). The theories of black revolution in the novels, however, take substantially different directions. Delany, writing before the Emancipation Proclamation,