SOURCE: "The Revolutionary Black Novels of Martin R. Delany and Sutton Griggs," in Melus, Vol. 5, No. 3, Fall, 1978, pp. 26-36.

In the following essay, Whitlow compares and contrasts Imperium in Imperio with Martin Delany's novel of slave revolt, Blake.

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...