Inez Parker Griggs (1875–1950)

Inez Parker Griggs was a poet who lived in Rolla, Missouri. The daughter of formerly enslaved individuals, she began publishing her poetry in 1898. Over the course of the following decade, Parker received widespread acclaim for her work, some of which reflected the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a writer whose African American dialect poetry attracted an international audience and drew attention from literary circles. For a few years, Griggs also went on poetry recitation tours throughout Missouri. After her marriage in 1912, she focused upon teaching music and elocution in her hometown.

Born in 1875, Inez Parker Griggs lived her entire life in the same home in Rolla, where she died in 1950. Her parents, John H. Parker and Sedonia (Blackwell) Parker, were formerly enslaved individuals. John, a shoemaker in Rolla who read widely in political philosophy, was a popular local speaker and was active in the Phelps County Republican Party. One of ten children, Inez Parker graduated from Rolla’s segregated Lincoln School, and, like her father, became a lifelong reader, often borrowing books from neighbors. One contemporary noted that she taught herself Latin and French. She loved playing the piano and for decades was a music teacher in her home. An artist, she often illustrated the poems that attracted national attention. 

Throughout her life, Griggs lived in a segregated community. In 1900, a tenth of the population in Rolla was Black, with most living on the south side of town, near the Lincoln School and Elkins Chapel Methodist Church. In 1912 she married Harold Griggs, but the couple had no children. Nonetheless, much of her life was filled with children as she offered them lessons in elocution as well as music. In addition, several of her poems were about children and a mother’s love for them. “Lullaby” is about a “Mammy’s own little black pearl” with her “crinkly hair all a-curl,” “long silky lashes,” and “lil’ velvet han’s.” Another poem, “Oh, My Honey Chile!” is about the death of a young son.

While many of her poems were never published, Griggs’s work began to appear in print in 1898 with two patriotic pieces about the nation’s entry into the Spanish-American War. Over the years, she wrote on a wide variety of subjects. There were holiday poems like “Christmas Tide” and “Easter.” She offered praise for the world she lived in with “Dolce Far Niente” and “Voice of the Spring Wind.” Griggs explored questions dealing with faith, inspiration, and eternal life in “Distances,” “Service,” and “Candle Light.” She spoke to the specific challenges Black Americans faced, especially in “’Mancipation,” in which she explained to all how it felt to former slaves, like her parents, “to be sot free.” However, Griggs always returned to poems about children, from “The Truants” and “De Chillen” to “Wash Day” and “Gawge Washin’ton’s Birthday.” Besides reminding them to “always be good” and not to forget “to pray,” she emphasized the critical importance of education, as in “School Time,” in which Griggs reminded children to “study hard” so they could “grow up wise an’ great.”

Griggs began to attract attention beyond Rolla in 1898 when she entered a poetry contest sponsored by a Chicago magazine called The Scroll. The editor wanted submissions on the topic of “Hope,” and the poems could be no longer than thirty lines. Parker was the only Black poet among the more than five hundred entrants, and her eighteen-line “Hope” was judged the best poem. 

In the decade after she won The Scroll prize, commentators heaped praise on the “colored girl” from small-town Rolla. A journalist at the Topeka Plaindealer hailed the work of “this simple country maid.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch praised her poetry as work “full of music,” and William Jennings Bryan’s Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, The Commoner, proclaimed her to be the “poet of a race.”

Commentators compared Griggs favorably with eighteenth-century enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley and, more frequently, with contemporary poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, particularly because, like Dunbar, Griggs wrote folk dialect in several of her poems. Following Dunbar’s death in 1906, Griggs published “And Paul Laurence Dunbar Sang.” In it, she paid tribute to the “soul that knew the soul-life of his people.”

Griggs gained notable recognition when James Jefferson Pipkin included her in his 1902 book, The Negro in Revelation, in History, and in Citizenship. Pipkin assembled examples of Black Americans who had excelled in various fields since the end of the Civil War to demonstrate to white readers the “Negro’s capabilities” and to Black readers the imperative “to be up and doing.” He included many examples from politics, journalism, law, medicine, and business. In his chapter on literature and the arts, Pipkin included only six people, two of whom were Dunbar and Griggs. She was, Pipkin asserted, “a young woman who is a remarkable instance of the fact that even in the higher realms of thought and feeling which are regarded as peculiar to the most gifted of all races—the poets—the Negro may be at home.” Similarly, a dozen years later, author Patrick R. Gay, in his book Progress and Achievements of the Colored People, argued that Griggs’s poems “betray the poetic gift of her race to a singular degree of beauty.” 

For a few years after 1898, Griggs was on the lecture circuit, reciting her poems in Rolla, St. Louis, Springfield, Lebanon, and Topeka, Kansas. She typically attracted large crowds, and in the words of one journalist, her compelling presentations “captured her audience.” 

After her marriage to Harold Griggs in 1912, she no longer toured and rarely published, focusing instead upon teaching music and elocution, playing the piano at the Elkins Chapel and community events, and organizing children’s carnivals. Apparently, her last published poem appeared in the Rolla Herald in 1945. In “Service,” Griggs provided a seemingly autobiographical statement when she called upon all to keep their lamp burning, for without “it’s steady ray” some lost soul would not find their “way.” 

Griggs died in Rolla on December 20, 1950, and is buried in the Rolla City Cemetery.