The Roots and Routes of “Imperium in Imperio”: St. Clair Drake, The Formative Years

Chicago: like the back of your hand;   the earlier railroad the same. Just as heavily veined and stressed,   you know and carry with you whole all of our suffering; a spread of pain   which, we know, you conceal quietly. Andrew Salkey, 1973.¹

My earliest memories of a black college involve an episode fifty-six years ago . . . My father had taken me . . . with him on a visit to his alma mater, the school that had fashioned him into a preacher and my mother into a schoolteacher, Virginia Theological Seminary and College . . . He had come there as a young immigrant from Barbados; my mother had come across the mountains from Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley. I remember that visit . . . Years later I watched black Baptists giving suppers and begging “to keep the Seminary alive” . . . The Seminary was theirs. It is still alive, impecunious and struggling. They refuse to let it die. St Clair Drake, 1971.²

Introduction

In 1899, Sutton Griggs published Imperium in Imperio, an obscure work of utopian fiction that unfolds around the creation of a separate black empire within the United States. One of the two main protagonists of the novel, Belton Piedmont, is a patriotic American, who believes that black people must make an attempt to persuade whites to grant them justice before wholly surrendering to a separate racial destiny. Failing in this mission, Piedmont reasoned, whites would be responsible for having created an empire within an empire. In contrast to Piedmont, Griggs introduced the wrathful Bernard Belgrade as a figure driven by his all-consuming hatred of whites to make a separate black empire a reality. Ending his novel with Piedmont’s execution by Belmont as a traitor of the Imperium, Griggs offers the ascendency of a black nationality over a hopeful vision of an integrated America. The duality of aims pursued by Piedmont and Belmont, which ultimately resulted in the creation of an independent black state, underscored for Griggs the tension around what it meant to be a “Negro” and an “American” at the precise moment when a system of segregation, motivated by the eugenicist impulse of upholding racial purity, was clarifying the spatial boundaries between whites and blacks across the South.³

Almost a half-century later a variation on this theme of imperium in imperio assumed sociological meaning in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1945, Black Metropolis offered a view of an urban black community “in the final stages of the Depression and in the midst of the Second World War.”⁴ Formed from a longer history of neglect and the inequality of opportunities in Chicago, the Bronzeville of Black Metropolis was the product of a color line and pervasive discrimination, but a world distinctive in its attributes and belonging entirely to black people. Devoid of the sentimentalism and overt political preaching of Griggs’ utopian novel, Black Metropolis showed black people as constantly striving to overcome the deprivations and impoverishment of discrimination in housing and employment while “tenaciously clinging to life, liberty, and happiness” through their own organizations and institutions. “This was the world of their relatives and friends. They knew no other!”⁵

In its own time this view of an urban black community underscored the attachment black people developed for a way of life seen as essential for survival and getting ahead in a world controlled by whites and called into question the extent to which the modernizing forces of city were, as Robert Park theorized, sweeping away the primitive system of caste most commonly associated with the rural south.⁶ As James B. McKee observed, the real significance of Black Metropolis to urban sociology was found in its rich description of a separate black community. That Bronzeville was able to take root and flourish suggested that the color line in Chicago was less rigid than the system of southern caste, even allowing, in certain areas, for some degree of interracial association. However, as Faye V. Harrison contends, the full extent of black people’s separate spatial [End...