The Hindered Hand

Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture

by Sutton Elbert Griggs, John Cullen Gruesser (Editor), Hanna Wallinger (Editor)

Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print, making him the most prolific African American novelist at the turn of the twentieth century. Brought out by Griggs’s own Orion Publishing Company in three distinct printings in 1905 and 1906, The Hindered Hand; or, the Reign of the Repressionist addresses the author’s key themes of amalgamation, emigration, armed resistance, and US overseas expansion; includes a melodramatic love story; and features two of the most sensational scenes in early African American fiction—a harrowingly graphic lynching of an innocent black couple based on actual events and the elaboration of a plot to wipe out white Southerners by introducing yellow fever germs into the water supply.
 
Written in response to Thomas Dixon’s recently published race-baiting novel The Leopard’s Spots, Griggs’s book depicts the remnants of the old Southern planter class, the racial crisis threatening the South and the North, the social ferment of the time, the changing roles of women, and the thwarted aspirations of a trio of African American veterans following the war against Spain. This scholarly edition of the novel, providing newly discovered biographical information and copious historical context, makes a significant contribution to African American literary scholarship.
 

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1905

About the author

Sutton Elbert Griggs was an African-American author, Baptist minister, and social activist. He is best known for Imperium in Imperio, a utopian work that envisions a separate African-American state within the United States.

Reviews

[Daniel Kleven]

Written as an "answer" to Thomas Dixon's thoroughy racist The Leopard's Spots, this book was interesting, but the plot was sometimes hard to follow, a little didactic at times, but for what it was trying to accomplish, it's great. One of a few books in the genre "Black Baptist novels."

[Bridget]

read as soon as you can

[sophie ｡･:*˚:✧｡]

i did not, repeat NOT sign up for this to be such a rollercoaster, ahh.

[Meredith Starkenburg]

3.5 stars