IMPERIUM IN IMPERIO

What if Black America built a nation of its own — in secret? Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave rise from the same segregated South by very different roads — one through hardship and faith, the other through privilege and ambition. Both brilliant, both denied their rightful place by a country that refuses to see them as equals, they are drawn into the Imperium in Imperio: a hidden Black government operating in secret within the United States, armed and ready to answer injustice with force. As the Imperium debates its future, the two men come to embody the choice facing a people pushed to the edge — patience or uprising, loyalty or revolution. And the decision they reach will demand everything. First published in 1899, Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio is a landmark of early African American fiction — one of the first Black political novels, a daring work of speculative imagination and righteous protest that asked questions America still hasn't answered. This Reclaimed edition restores Griggs's complete original text in a newly designed, illustrated volume — part of Lost Classics of Black Literature, with an introduction by Will Jones.