imperium in imperio

Some of the earliest depictions of Black collegiate life can be found in American literature from the late 19th century, including the 1899 novel “Imperium in Imperio” by Sutton E. Griggs, in which the main character attends the fictitious Stowe University in Nashville.

Indeed, he resembles nothing so much as a protagonist from the a subgenre in African American fiction that includes novels like Imperium in Imperio, Dark Princess, Black No More, and The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Each of these texts imagines a reordering of the dominant political order under the leadership of a charismatic and disciplined Black leader.

But they allege, that they are sovereign in themselves, and only amenable to their own laws; but as they are now in the county of Tryon, this position is anomalous, to say the least; it is an establishment of an imperium in imperio, which cannot exist—as I could substantiate by the authority of the best legal writers.

Also he took advantage of the rule of the Commonwealth to indulge much more freely than he might have otherwise dared in rationalistic criticism of religious doctrines; while, amid the turmoil of sects, he could the more forcibly urge that the preservation of social order, when again firmly restored, must depend on the assumption by the civil power of the right 548 to wield all sanctions, supernatural as well as natural, against the pretensions of any clergy, Catholic, Anglican or Presbyterian, to the exercise of an imperium in imperio.

Here was a German colony in existence and almost constituting already an imperium in imperio.