of self-help advocates. His 1923 nonfiction book Guide to Racial Greatness; or The Science of Collective Efficiency advocated for racial uplift through collective efficiency. Griggs's careers in both the church and social welfare sphere were active and itinerant. In Houston, he helped establish the National Civil and Religious Institute. In 1914, he founded the National Public Welfare League. From 1925 to 1926, he served as president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary, which his father helped found. His longest tenure—19 years as pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Memphis—saw him act on his belief in the social mission of churches, providing the only swimming pool and gymnasium then available to African Americans in the city. Death and legacy The Wall Street Crash of 1929 stripped the Tabernacle of investment funds and led to its bankruptcy. Griggs returned to Hopewell Baptist Church in Denison, Texas, then to a brief pastorship in Houston. Shortly after resigning that post in 1933, he died in Houston, and was buried in Dallas. Griggs as an author Griggs's first novel follows a familiar formula: two childhood friends are separated by wealth, education, skin tone, and political outlook; one is a militant and one an integrationist. A traumatic incident galvanizes the more moderate friend into action, and the two work together to redress the injustice. Imperium in Imperio (1899) follows this plotline with a startling twist: the revelation of an African American "empire within an empire," a shadow government complete with a Congress based in Waco, Texas. The light-skinned and more militant Bernard Belgrave who has been hand-picked to serve as president advocates a takeover of the Texas state government, while the dark-skinned Belton Piedmont argues for assimilation and cooperation. Bernard reluctantly has Belton executed as a traitor only after Belton resigns from the Imperium (an act that is tantamount to suicide), leaving the potentially violent and unstable Bernard in control of the Imperium as the novel ends. The Hindered Hand, written in 1905 as a direct reply to Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, contains graphic accounts of sexual violence and lynching, and was among the most popular African-American novels of the period. In the novel's third edition, Griggs published a supplement entitled "A Hindering Hand: The Poor White and the Negro" which further criticized Dixon for instilling racism among poor whites against African Americans. With a stiff prose style and long rhetorical passages punctuated by melodramatic