Desegregating the Future: Sutton E. Griggs’ Pointing the Way and American Utopian Fiction in the Age of Jim Crow

At the turn into the twentieth century the utopian genre constituted “an unparalleled literary expression of social anxieties and political hope.”¹ Speculating on utopia as a “better place” (eu-topos) was a popular and bestselling literary mode of debating what ideals should inform concrete social planning. Scholars have offered a variety of explanations for this popularity noting, for instance, how the social tensions of the Gilded Age and the enormous success and political influence exercised by utopian novels such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) inspired a veritable outpouring of speculative fiction that had at its heart what Kenneth M. Roemer terms a “faith in book power.”² African American writers shared with their contemporaries this faith in the efficacy of literature as a weapon for social change. Thus it comes as no surprise that they too engaged a literary genre like utopia that had already proven particularly able to mobilize readers and generate a commitment to social change, as evidenced by the nationwide political impact of Bellamy’s novel.

“Rebellion,” as Jean Pfaelzer has argued, “is part of the inner logic” of the utopian genre.³ Inasmuch as utopian fiction sanctioned the political import of imagining alternative societies, it offered an established literary context of production and reception for the kind of comprehensive socio-political critique African American writers had traditionally inserted in their novels. It also seemed to provide a terrain for a degree of interracial ideological convergence. Some of its recurrent themes (including the need for policies of economic redistribution, the importance of greater state intervention, the indictment of inequality and widespread corruption, and the emphasis on cooperation) echoed classic tenets of black political thought that could be found in the work of African American writers, who notably omitted, however, many of the eugenist and racist tendencies that most often accompanied these themes in mainstream utopian fiction.

Authors like Sutton E. Griggs, E. Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Edward A. Johnson wrote works of speculative fiction in order to seize the literary and cultural power to articulate a restructuring of the very nation that was discriminating against them. At the center of their vision of a better historical alternative they placed racial equality as an essential condition for socio-economic equality and as the indispensable means to realize the founding democratic ideals of a historically multiracial American nation. Admittedly, the critique of white supremacy, as well as of the contradictions of U.S. democracy, was by the late-nineteenth century a characterizing feature of African American fiction, but the utopian genre was singular in the degree to which its very conventions required the explicit articulation of social criticism, offering the opportunity to assert an oppositional stance in new ways and to new effects. In African American speculative fiction the focus on the black experience from an insider’s perspective becomes explicitly normative, and as such a “novum” for both black and white readers used to the hegemony of white supremacist views in the public sphere.⁴ Appreciating how transgressive and radical the presentation of this different perspective as normative was at the time can prove difficult for twenty-first century readers used to a few decades of discussions, however contested, on multiculturalism. Yet the estrangement effect that results from moving African Americans from the margin to the center of utopian planning becomes all too manifest when contextualized within a contemporaneous mainstream utopian literary tradition that systematically excluded blacks from visions of a better life or condescendingly included them on a separate-but-equal basis that projected indefinitely into the future the racial inequalities of the present and the past.

In this essay I will argue that such literary and historical contextualization enables a profound reevaluation of the literary experimentalism, cultural work, political significance, and continuing relevance of the most prolific African American author of speculative fiction at the turn into the twentieth century: Sutton E. Griggs (1872–1930). A Baptist minister, Griggs was also a novelist, essayist, activist, and publisher. However, while his first novel Imperium in Imperio (1899...