The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

by Kerri K. Greenidge

Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award [Biography]

New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022

Winner of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize

Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

Publishers Weekly • 10 Best Books of 2022

Best Books of 2022: NPR, Oprah Daily, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Chicago Public Library



A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.


Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.



That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.



In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.



A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, American History, Race, Civil War, Politics

432 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 8, 2022

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the author establishes, there's definitely a narrative of the Grimke sisters in the popular imagination--Sue Monk Kidd wrote an entire novel designed to make white readers, particularly white women, comfortable. 'The Invention of Wings' in 2014 presented a romanticized and sanitized story that highlighted specific parts of Sarah Grimké's relationship with one of the enslaved people that she owned, Handful, a 'gift' given to her on her 11th birthday. While it is true that Sarah helped Handful learn how to read and was scared within an inch of her life by her father, warned never again to do something illegal, and Sarah found her ways around this away from her father's watchful eye, the novel is primarily a narrative that focuses on enabling white readers to picture themselves as the heroic, noble white saviour who became an abolitionist and went against her Southern plantation-owning family's roots.

Even though I have read a substantial amount about The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, some of the materials have been confusing, or not comprehensive enough. This book changes that. For those who don't know the story, the Grimke sisters were white women who owned enslaved people of African descent on a plantation in South Carolina. Resisting their manifest destiny, they left this life behind and became abolitionists in the North. However, as the cover copy of this book indicates, not much has been written about their Black relatives; their brother, Henry; and one of the enslaved people he owned, Nancy Weston, with whom he had children, in addition to his white wife, Selinah Sarah Simmons. Professor Kerri K. Greenridge, a professor at Tufts University, presents a comprehensive and detailed view of the Grimkes and their family.

There are not enough texts about people from white families who had Black "branches," as they referred to them, in many cases choosing not to associate for various reasons and not always obvious.

History is more complex than that. Both Sarah and Angelina Grimke, when they became aware of their nephews of African descent--a product of their white brother Henry's relationship with an enslaved woman that he owned--helped them through schooling, but they also, as the author establishes, tolerated the sadistic abuse that Henry inflicted on them.

On a related note, because so many of the Grimkes, both white and Black, are similarly named, the author usefully has included a guide at the front of the book that breaks down who each person is, and refers to them by distinguishing nicknames to disambiguate them.

The details of the Black Grimkes are lesser known, and the author has provided an illuminating account of their lives, very often overshadowed by their white abolitionist relations.

"The tragedy of the Grimke sisters' lives was the fact that they never acknowledged their complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against," as the author argues. Despite their role as abolitionists, the sisters still had an image in their minds of the kneeling and 'eternally grateful' slave.

One of the gaps in scholarship about white abolitionists, and in fictional narratives that depict white people in the South such as the Confederate Vampire is a discussion of why they opposed slavery (cf. Bill Compton, Jasper from Twilight, and Stefan & Damon Salvatore among others). We're always told that they are opposed to it and that they didn't really want to fight in the Civil War, and not for the Confederacy, but they did anyway. These narratives fundamentally fail to address the specific reasons or upbringing, reasons, or evidence that led to the change of heart in these white characters. 'The Grimkes' seeks to reconcile some of that by providing details of how the sisters Sarah and Angelina came to reject the views of their slaveholding family in South Carolina, and how they eventually converted from their branch of Christianity to becoming Quakers.

Of particular interest is the author's exploration of the Grimke sisters' lives in Philadelphia, particularly in the context of the summer of 1834, then going back to when Charleston was Charles Town in the late 1700s.

The book details how the sister's father, John Faucheraud Grimké, a Justice of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions and lawmaker, came from Huguenot stock who fled France in the 1600s after Protestants came under attack. His wife to-be, Mary Smith, known as "Polly," is a crucial figure in the history of transatlantic slavery. As Stephanie E. Rogers highlighted in her award-winning landmark text, 'They Were Her Property,' one of the largest gaps and bits of misinformation in the minds of people when they think of transatlantic slavery and how it operated is the assumption that only white men were enslavers and planters.

The reality is so, so much more harsh. Not only were white women and plantation mistresses some of the absolute cruellest, vilest, and harshest in their treatment of enslaved people who they owned, but also, because of situations like the Grimkes with the white and Black branches, there were all kinds of situations in which a mixed-race son of an enslaver, if born of a free woman of colour, would possibly inherit the plantation property after his father's death, including the enslaved people there.

Polly was a horrendous human being who enjoyed torturing the enslaved people on the plantation of her husband. It truly is a wonder that any of her children turned out to be nothing like their mother.

One of the other vital components of the book is the brutality and murders of enslaved people of African descent that Sarah and Angelina witnessed, which was one part of what shocked them into their eventual abolitionist views.

Also dealt with are the relationships that the sisters had, including Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina's eventual husband.

Although Henry acknowledged his mixed-race children through Nancy Weston, he never manumited them. The book does an excellent job chronicling the Black members of the Grimke family and the harsh contrasts to their lives versus their white kin.

Another important family in this narrative are the Fortens, of whom Charlotte Forten, an African-American woman and educator, would go on to marry Francis James Grimke, one of the nephews of Sarah and Angelina.

The relationships included in this text, the vital explorations of why this matters in a contemporary context, and most of all, the necessary due and highlighted lens of stories that have been suppressed over time all combine to make this an essential text for anyone looking to gain more insights into the entire Grimke family, and race relations in the United States in both the 1800s and 1900s.

Many aspects of this family are still not as widely known or explored as they should be, and this text is an impressive addition to the body of literature about them.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. were taught very little, if anything, about the life of the enslaved in this country and even less about the fight for emancipation and life for people formerly enslaved. This book gives insight into how the free Black elite of American cities in the 19th century were instrumental in the cause. Equally interesting was the author's account of the challenges this relatively small number of affluent, well-educated, and influential Black people faced in post-Reconstruction years as they stuggled to reconcile their perceived superiority to the "masses" at a time when segregation and discrimination against all Black people were legal and pervasive. There is so much to learn about the history of race in the U.S.; this book is an excellent contribution to that study.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of this book wrote about a complex issue that will always be with us.
Human history is constantly changing. Do we learn from it?

[Cheyanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it difficult to evaluate this book, except to say that it is less a group biography than a treatise on the politics of race, color, class, and gender. Writing from a decidedly 21st century perspective, Professor Greenidge has obviously done a great deal of research and makes some valid points, but she frequently supplements the historical record with speculation about what her subjects might have, could have, or should have done. I see that many reviewers responded positively to this approach, but I often felt that the complexity of individual lives was lost in the process.

[Anne Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another book I won in a Goodreads Giveaway, so naturally it went to the top of my "To Read" list.

This is a nonfiction work that exposes the history of a multi-ethnic family, the product of a sexual relationship between an ethnically-African slave and her ethnically-European slave holder. It follows the family from this beginning to the Great Depression.

Of interest is how the fight to obtain "legitimacy" for the members of the family against the constant pressure and prejudices from ethnically-European members of society intertwines with the similar fight for legitimacy by women of all ethnic backgrounds. The reader will likely see reflections of themselves in some of the events that touched the family's various members.

As someone versed in genetics and the study of DNA, my overwhelming thought while reading this book was that there are no races among humans; we are truly a single race: the human race as reflected by our common scientific label of Homo sapiens with no additional subspecies specifications, our genetics being so nearly identical that the distinctions become merely a matter of differing phenotypic appearances that span a continuum of skin colors, eye shapes, and hair features. Perhaps one day, with books such as this one, all of the members of Homo sapiens will come to realize this.

[Daniel Kleven · Rating 1 out of 5]

UPDATE November 8, 2024

Myra Glenn has written a critical review of the book in the publication Reviews in American History:

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/93...

Here's a paragraph of the review that encapsulates the problems with this book in a nutshell:

"Although well-written, The Grimkes is also a deeply flawed book. All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes. She also fails to engage with the major scholarship noted above. For these reasons Greenidge fails to offer a compelling re-assessment of either the white or African American Grimkés."


UPDATE May 26, 2024

I originally gave this 5 stars, noting one point that "piqued my attention" and needing further review.

I've done the further review, and in the process discovered that Greenidge in this book so badly misuses sources, miscites sources, partially quotes sources, uses questionable secondary (and tertiary sources), omits relevant primary evidence, in short, so badly handles the evidence, that I can no longer recommend this book. Which sad, because we still need an actual biography of Francis Grimké. I believe in historical revisionism, and in calling out the flaws in historical figures when warranted, but after exhaustively looking at all the sources she cited in the book, this misses the mark by mile.

I plan to write something more substantial on this and publish it on the blog. For now I just need to note this and downgrade my stars.

ORIGINAL REVIEW (October 2023):

An excellent, deeply sourced, genuinely fresh contribution to scholarship on the Grimkés. I came to this via my interest in Francis (and Charlotte) Grimké, and ended up with a sprawling story stretching nearly a century and a half, from ante-bellum Black Philadelphia and Charleston, SC, (the Fortens, the white and black Grimkés), to the Grimké-Welds, to the Grimké brothers, until the curtain falls 140 years later on "Nana"--Angelina Weld Grimké, Archie's only daughter, Frank and Lottie's niece, Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright.

This book is fresh, it is not a rehashing of old studies in a new form--Greenidge's endnotes span to over 50 pages long, with hundreds of references to archival material in the "Archibald H. Grimké Papers," the "Angelina Weld Grimké Collection," the "Weld-Grimké Family Correspondence," the "Francis J. Grimké Papers," and more. I've read a bit on Francis Grimké in particular, including Ferry's dissertation, and a dozen academic studies/papers/chapters, and to me the book sparkled with fresh insights into his life and work. This truly is now an indispensable contribution to Grimké scholarship.

In particular, Greenidge brings a sharp eye to racial dynamics and gives us a revisionist history--in the best sense--that re-centers the story on its Black protagonists; does away with excuses for white racism, paternalism, indifference, and hostility; and doesn't give "passes" because a white benefactor made some kind gestures. For all these reasons, this book deserves to be an important source going forward for all future accounts of the Grimké family(s).

There was one point, however, that piqued my attention, and caused a furrowed brow. One of the major threads of the book is the claim that Francis Grimké and the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church that he pastored in Washington, D. C., perpetuated a form of "colorism," with a congregation with predominantly "light complexions" and various forms of "color consciousness" and "rumors of colorphobia" (363). However, unlike the bulk of the book, this claim is built almost entirely on second-hand reports and secondary sources, not the "Papers" or "Sermons" of Grimké himself. This claim has sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole, chasing down Greenidge's sources, and taking a look for myself. If Francis Grimké engaged in "colorism," this would be a deeply concerning flaw in his legacy, but one worth facing square on and reckoning with.

If, however, there isn't sufficient evidence to back up this claim, I think it that will need to be accounted for, and as one reads this book, that particular "thread" would need to be taken with a grain of salt.

That one point aside, this book is deserving of all the accolades it's receiving this year--the awards, the "books of the year" lists, the Oprah shout-out--all of them. If you are interested in American history, Black history, the Grimkés, the Welds, the Fortens, Black Philly, Black Washington, the abolitionists, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the "Talented Tenth," or any of the specific figures in this family, you really ought to read this book. Truly excellent.

[Jessica - How Jessica Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting re-analysis of two famous white abolitionist sisters and their relationship with their black nephews. (Sons of their plantation-owning brother and an enslaved woman.)

Super super hard to follow on audio though, bc many of the characters have the same names in different generations. There were three Angelina Grimkes! I kept getting confused.

[Hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely not a fast read but the picture it paints is essential. I find books like this so good at examining nuance and contradictions and hypocrisy because of the amount of time you're allowed to spend in the lives of the people featured. The white abolitionists interactions with Black women radicals was absolutely 🔥. Some incredible history here

[Kate Sampsell · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can’t prove something from nothing.

I actually didn’t finish the book. I barely started it. When I came to a passage where the author excoriated Sarah Grimké for two things—failing to record the unique sexual threat that Black woman faced and teaching Hitty to read—I slammed the book closed and have been fuming ever since. I don’t revere the Grimké sisters as white women, unlike those who might take offense at this review might accuse. I view them as historical actors contextualized in time and place, an opinion I have arrived at by reading dozens if not hundreds of books, primary and secondary, about the period.

My first complaint issues from the fact that the author spends a lot of time setting up Sarah Grimké to take a fall for not recording outrage over rape of Black women. I fear the author will try to get a lot of traction out of this hugely flawed methodology. True, sources are scarce for African American history, but there are legitimate ways of getting around that. What is NOT legitimate is using nothing to prove something. The historical record is patchy. We don’t know what’s been lost, or edited by an unfriendly hand, or subject to self-censorship. A young woman did not discuss sexual matters in public or private, even in the privacy of one’s journal in that time and place. The author rejected out of hand the arguments made in the 20th century that the lives of white women were seriously circumscribed and controlled by men, etiquette, and tyrannical mothers and governesses. Perhaps this totalitarianism of thought and fear of discovery kept Sarah from recording the open secret of what were illegal (not because of rape but because of race) abuses. The point is that we just don’t know. As long as there is a reasonable explanation for an absence, we cannot infer anything from the lacuna. In this, she demonstrates horribly bad historical methodology and wipes out nuance.

Onto Hitty. Sarah taught her childhood companion Hitty to read, in defiance of the totalitarian structure of the day. Hitty was punished for Sarah’s defiance of law and practice. Instead of blaming to totalitarian structure and forced hegemony of the Slave Power, the author blames Sarah for defying it! No matter the consequences short of death, Hitty’s life would have been improved by knowing how to read. Reading gave her a chance to escape, to carve out both industry and privacy in the worst conditions. So, according to the author, that Sarah did not consider the unforeseen punishment consequences to Hitty of making her literate, she is at fault for those consequences, not the Slaveocracy.

And, these attacks are leveled with understandable, but still inappropriate in a history monograph, presentist moral outrage, itself another terrible methodology choice.

The author also blames Sarah for how she arrived at her abolitionism, as a personal journey. What the author does not tell the reader is Sarah and Angelina were Transcendentalists, like 90% of abolitionists. Transcendentalism grew out of Puritanism and the automachia, the self-conflict of Christianity, the internal struggle to find God’s spark within. Sarah did what people did back then, she followed a path set down hundreds of years earlier and grew with it in a historical moment of great religious change. How else should she have come to abolition, through the Civil Rights Movement, the internet, or some other 20th- or 21st-century invention? While contemporary (meaning now) movements of subaltern liberation, like BLM and others, are more than laudable—they are necessary and long overdue—absolutely nothing about 19th-century North Carolina, or Philadelphia for that matter, hinted at such future events.

There is a superlative history in here of the Black Grimkés that I desperately want to know, but it buried in such open hostility of two women who were operating with in their own small world, and kind of did an amazing thing within it. Stop judging the past by the present. The result is unreadable. I wish I had had an opportunity to comment on this as a manuscript. I would have suggested to leave the generation of the famous sisters to others, or put it in a paper where a rant could be defended, and to concentrate on what’s important in this book, the Black Grimkés. The presentist outrage and the desire to read something from nothing interfere with what could have been a very fine monograph indeed.

[Nick Crisanti · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enlightening look into the lives of the interracial Grimke family; most notably the white abolitionist sisters, Sarah Moore Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld, and their Black nephews, Archibald "Archie" Henry Grimke, Francis "Frank" James Grimke and John Weston Grimke, and also Archie's daughter, Angelina "Nana" Weld Grimke. The nephews were the sons of Sarah and Angelina's brother Henry Grimke and the enslaved Black woman he owned, Nancy Weston.

The book explores the complicated struggle between two sides of the same family - the white activists who know best and the Black offspring of master and slave who want to forget. The Grimke sisters saw slavery as morally wrong and championed the abolitionist cause and yet they could never accept Black and white equality, which is how the majority of abolitionists thought at the time. But they also wanted their Black nephews to uphold the family name by dressing proper, getting an education, and being respectable citizens. The nephews, Archie and Frank having been enslaved themselves by their half-brother, E. Montague Grimke, chose to bury their past and used the Grimke name, and their staunch determination, to elevate themselves above the poor Black masses, as the nephews were considered part of the colored elite, along with the other Black members of their extended family.

Angelina Weld Grimke grew up not knowing the history of enslavement and brutality in her family tree. She never knew her grandfather Henry tormented Stephen, the family butler, and would repeatedly bash his head "against walls, doorjambs, and stairwells." She certainly didn't know of her own father's enslavement and abuse by her uncle Montague or anything about her grandmother Nancy's past. She lived with her white mother, Sarah, and her family in the Midwest until she was sent to live with her father back East when she was seven. She mingled with those from her father's strata and their children and could not relate to the poor Black members of the lower classes. Though she wanted to. Her repeated questions to her father and Uncle Frank about their past went unanswered again and again.

Kerri K. Greenidge has done extensive research on her topic, and it shows - I don't think anything has been left out. The flaw with this book, though, is its disjointedness. The narrative is somewhat chronological, but we do move back and forth through time while also jumping from one family to another and one part of the country to another. It doesn't flow that easily and you'll soon be lost if you're not paying close attention. There are also a lot of names to remember; characters from different generations with the same names and some even with the same nicknames are added obstacles. The cast of characters included at the beginning of the book didn't really help unmuddy the waters the first time through, it wasn't until I reread it after I was finished that it provided more clarity.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family is an important work, and I'm glad the knowledge within is now my own, but it would have benefited from a clearer narrative and a more focused approach. To me, the beginning chapters were scattered and overwhelming, with this and that and he and she all coming at you all at once. It gets more refined in the latter parts of the book where the attention is on Archie, Frank, and Nana, and this is where Greenidge is at her best.

[Rachel-RN · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll try to keep this short and sweet.
An excellent read about a family. A family who owned slaves and the offspring who were born free and able to enjoy their lives and others who were born into slavery because their mother was a slave herself. Sarah and Angelina Grimke were sisters and fled to the North. They became well known abolitionists. And history teaches us about them. But their brother, Henry, had 3 sons with one of the people he owned. Nancy Weston. The sons were Archibald, Francis, and John. The sister's biracial nephews. The sister's relationships with them were complicated and while they felt owning human beings was wrong, they didn't necessarily see them as equals. History doesn't focus on these Grimkes. This book helps change that.
This focuses on the Black Grimke's who fought tooth and nail to change their lives and make things better for themselves and others. Archibald was involved with the NAACP, Francis became a pastor. Archibald's daughter Angelina (this is a popular name in this family, Sarah too) was a popular author whose play was one of the first written and produced by a Black woman. This does a good job and focuses on the good, the gray, the not-so-good, and the ugly. Too often history teaches only one side. And our past does affect the present.

[Kate Meiners · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such an interesting topic - the story of a family and their connection to slavery. I found many parts of the book that were helpful to uncover history that hasn’t been told and pointing out the underlying beliefs that led to the actions of characters in the book. Many times, the book was confusing because it followed so many different people (some that had the same names!). I wished that the book would have been structured in a way that would cause the reader to connect with the historical people. Often, it felt like reading more of an extended essay (not bad, just harder to stay engaged as a reader).

What I did find especially interesting was the commentary on Sarah and Angelina Grimke’s abolitionist views. The author points out that although Sarah and Angelina were against slavery, their views were limited. They didn’t see black people as equal to white people. The author expresses that what many abolitionists didn’t do was talk to black people, listen to their voices, and consider what their ideas for change were.

I wonder how often we in society do that today. Do we, removed from a certain situation that doesn’t directly impact us, think that we hold the answers for a solution? Does this blind us? What would it take for us to stop and listen? The answer might be a lesson in humility.

[Bob H · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Grimke sisters, Angelina Grimke Ward and Sarah Moore Grimke, were well-known before the Civil War as advocates for abolition through their writings and speeches, and later on, as feminists. Members of a white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, they renounced their heritage and moved to Philadelphia, joining Quaker society and becoming prominent in society there (it seems a number of Charleston's aristocracy traveled to, and sometimes settled in, Philadelphia in those years). Though revered in their day, and by historians since, the author does point out that the sisters, and their Northern society, seem to have had something of a disconnect: their abolitionism seems to have grown from a sense of it being a sin -- their sin -- but tended to minimize the origin of their comfortable life, and, moreover, didn't join this to a sense of racial equality, where they and their society could be condescending to Black people, even survivors of slavery, even when their three young Black nephews turned up after Charleston fell to Union forces, freed of the white Grimkes' enslavement.

The three brothers, Archibald, Frank and John, had survived a horrific life with the sisters' family. Henry Grimke, their white father, had followed the common custom of sexually exploiting Black slave women, hence their birth into slavery, and Henry kept them as slaves and never manumitted them. Henry's white son Montague would keep them in bondage and battered his three half-brothers cruelly. The author goes into great detail on the pervasive cruelties of slavery in Charleston, and it left a lifetime of trauma for those who survived it, including the Grimkes' former butler, Stephen, who had crippling brain damage from Henry's abuse, and who also turned up on the sisters' doorstep in later years.

The book is harsh reading, and details white racial violence and cruelty, both before and after slave times, and in both North and South before and after the war. The sisters seem a lot less sympathetic against this backdrop, in this telling. The book's prose is a bit dense, for all this, but does paint a more detailed and complex portrait of the sisters, and is worthwhile for that. The story also becomes an epic family story, in its second half, as it follows Frank's and Archibald's education and achievements: Frank would become the pastor of Washington's Fifteenth Street Church after graduating from the Princeton Seminary, and Archibald would rise in Massachusetts politics and end up as US consul to Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic, in which he seems to have abetted the US neo-colonial exploitation of the region). As such, they were part of a Black elite in the North who somehow prospered and found prominence in spite of the pervasive racism of the times, an elite that this author brings to life. It's a fascinating, epic story in the second half of the book.

The author also has a major new character in Archibald's daughter, Angelina "Nana" Weld Grimke, who would become a major writer and playwright, best remembered for her 1916 play "Rachel" about racial violence and lynching, but a prolific and able poet and writer through much of her life. (The author also mentions Nana's romantic interest in women, which would cause her trouble with her family and represent a lifetime of mostly unfulfilled yearning).

In all, an important contribution to new scholarship on America's troubled past.

[Shadira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah and Angelina Grimke are iconic nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists and women’s suffrage activists. Raised in the South Carolina slavocracy, they courted controversy with their antislavery and feminist views and became the darlings of elite Philadelphia radicals. Yet as historian Greenidge (Bla makes abundantly clear, the Grimkes remained mired in racism and classism, and their dedication to eradicating slavery had more to do with gratifying their own Christian views than with actually helping Black people. Greenidge skillfully contrasts the simpering piety of the Grimkes with the fierce determination of leaders in the free Black community, notably the descendants of legendary Black entrepreneur James Forten.


His granddaughter, Charlotte, chafed at the hypocrisy of Quaker abolitionists like the Grimkes, who denounced Southern slavery while ignoring the virulent racism and violence threatening Black Philadelphians. After the Civil War, when the Grimkes learned that their brother (a sadistic abuser) had fathered three sons with an enslaved woman, the sisters treated their nephews, Archibald, Francis, and John, not as equals to be loved but rather as burdens to be endured. Nor would they take pains to rescue the boys’ mother from the violent Southern backlash against former slaves. A sobering and timely look at how self-centered “benevolence” can become complicity.



The author’s discoveries reveal both 'white reformers’ disavowal of their complicity in America’s racial project' and 'the limits of interracial alliances' ... A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history.

[SheReaders Book Club · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had previously only known about the 2 Grimke sisters from the 1800s. This was a very interesting book! I would love to have coffee with the author.

[Matt Sokolowski · Rating 1 out of 5]

Several basic factual errors along with the use of the word “perhaps” made me stop reading the book.

[Ralph Plagman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This scholarly monograph is the landmark biography of America’s most important multiracial family of the nineteenth century. In telling the story of the famous abolitionist sisters, it uncovers the lives of the Black members of their family. Highly readable; highly revealing!

[CJ]

Really interesting and powerful book about the larger Grimke family. I knew vaguely about the Grimke sisters and their abolition work, but was unaware of their background or the black side of their family until reading this. I'm glad that we collectively are moving away from the "great man" (or great woman) version of history and I think Greenidge did a good job of describing the historical figures without shying away from the parts of their history that were complicated or the places where they failed to live up to their own stated ideals. Two of the things personally I took away from this book is how unsustainable a "noblesse oblige" version of antiracist activism is--it was striking how many of the abolitionists mentioned here apparently still viewed black people as inferior and were uncomfortable seeing them as equals and not just suffering victims. I was also really struck by how much black women suffered from the expectations and prejudices both of their white female and black male counterparts. That's not particularly a novel insight (whole books have been written about intersectionality as it pertains to black women's oppression) but it was still remarkable to read about it a historical context. I was also surprised by some of Greenidge's description of northern black society and the discrimination she described against the 'lower class' often formerly enslaved black community.

I have some mild criticisms of this book: it covers such a long period of time and has so many characters that it was easy to get turned around, though I'm not sure if structuring it differently would have solved that. Also, she sometimes described people's motivations for thinking or doing certain things that I wondered where she got them from. But on the whole I would highly recommend it for a look into the history and politics of ante and postbellum 1800s America.

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings on this book. it felt like I was reading through a research paper, not a book. It was so detailed that I often got lost in the weeds… and bored. To be fair, it was also difficult to follow because so many family members had similar names ( the list of family members was helpful). And lastly, it switched through time periods making an already complex history even harder to follow. I appreciate the author providing an honest and unflinching portrait of the south, slavery, and the complicated family trees that came from it. Books often only show us one snippet of enslaved people’s lives. This book provided a wide lens at gender, race, class, education, and hierarchies across generations. While it’s important to see the Grimke sisters clear eyed, the author seemed to judge them harshly from present day standards and knowledge. I would expect them to be exactly as they were given the era they lived in. Overall, I’m glad I read it but I wish had been less heavy with details. so I could have absorbed the human feelings and lives more fully. A lot got lost in the sauce for me. It has made me want to read biographies of Individual Grimke family members.

[The Atlantic]

"The latest addition to the Grimke literature marks a new departure. Greenidge’s 'The Grimkes' is not a story about heroes. Instead, it is intended as an exploration of trauma and tragedy. Like the studies of the Grimkes that have preceded it, the book reflects the challenges of our own time, but Greenidge, who is an assistant professor at Tufts, regards these not with optimism about possibilities for racial progress but with something closer to despair. She set out, she declares in her introduction, to write 'a family biography that resonates in the lives of those who struggle with the personal and political consequences of raising children and families in the aftermath of the twenty-first-century betrayal of the radical human rights promise of the 1960s.'" — Drew Gilpan Faust

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well-researched and constructed well. The writing is good, but the names were so intricate with all of the various nicknames, it was hard at times to keep track. There is a nice glossary at the front. While I appreciate the author’s premise, there was a level of defensiveness or cynicism that started from the intro. Her scholarship was so thorough that her points were justified, but the tone of the book was just sharp. Interesting book! 3.5 stars

[Rebecca Stilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a bit of this and found this author so condescending and presumptuous about what other people were feeling or thinking that I couldn’t go on

[Marcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. This was just tedious.

[Sandie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kerri K. Greenridge gives us a compelling, well-written, and unflinching history of the Grimke family. Sisters Angelina and Sarah turned their backs on their slave-holding family whose South Carolinian rice plantations were the source of their wealth. They fled North and became ardent abolitionists and suffragettes and supported Archibald and Thomas, their brother Henry's sons, who were born to Nancy Weston, a beautiful, illiterate slave woman. Both nephews became prosperous and prominent members of New England's Black elite. Philadelphia's extraordinary African-African-American Forten family is an important part of the story. Greenridge covers the cruelty of the slave holding Grimkes, the violence that erupts against innocent Black families in the North, and the racist attitudes that permeated the thinking of both white and black abolitionists, including the Quakers. She also introduced me to Nana Grimke, Archie's spoiled, rebellious daughter who lived her life as a lesbian, a poet, a playwright, and a faithful daughter. Told through a contemporary prism, it is a tragic narrative that diminishes the not insubstantial successes of the sisters and their nephews. It is worth reading, not because it reveals our heroes to have lived their lives by crippling 19th century racial and sexist norms, but because Greenridge reveals a history that we need to understand and to finally begin to rid ourselves of racism and to honor the flawed but hopeful lives of Thomas, Archie, Sarah, and Angelina. It is a fascinating book highly recommended to readers of American and African-American history.

[B Jesrani · Rating 4 out of 5]

B Jesrani

Exhaustively Researched

This book contains a wealth of information as it recreates the historical and social milieu of the Grimké family through the years. It was difficult to keep track of the number of friends and relatives associated with the family. Many of the people mentioned did play some role in the Grimké’s lives but, since the family was large, the organizations that the Grimkés associated with many, and the places they lived numerous, it was slow going making the transition from person to person, place to place. Ultimately, some of the most essential facts got swallowed in the sea of information. However, for those who want an in-depth understanding of this fascinating, accomplished family, of a picture of slavery in 19th C Charleston, the rise of organizations that advocated for abolition, suffrage and equality and the considerable Grimké family contribution to these movements, it is a worthwhile read. Particularly interesting to me was the depiction of the black elite of the 19th to early 20th C to which the sons, born to an enslaved woman and the Grimké sisters’ brother, belonged.

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

My basic view of this book is that it attacks fascinating subject matter in an inadequately fascinating manner. It starts with Angelina and Sarah Grimke, two daughters of a wealthy Charleston slaveholding family who became prominent abolitionists and women’s rights activists; Angelina later married the famous abolitionist preacher Theodore Weld. Their brother Henry had three sons with an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston; after the Civil War, the brothers moved north and established relationships with their white aunts. Two of the brothers became prominent members of the nation’s Black elite in two of the cities where it was most firmly established, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. Francis Grimke led one of the nation’s most prominent (and affluent) black churches for years, while Archibald Grimke took on various political leadership positions, delivered votes for both Democratic and Republican candidates, aligned himself variously with conservative advocates like Booker T. Washington and with radicals like William Monroe Trotter, and even served as Grover Cleveland’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Francis married into some of the oldest money in Black Philadelphia, while Archibald socialized heavily with white liberal women and eventually married one of them (although the marriage was unsuccessful and they were separated for most of their lives). Tracing this narrative takes the book through a variety of settings where geography and race and class intersect in distinctive ways. There’s the brutal antebellum South Carolina of the Grimke plantation, and the antebellum Charleston of the “colored Westons,” a network of relatively well-off Black people who lived quasi-free lives, rented out their labor, and even married free people, although South Carolina law prevented them from being legally manumitted. There’s the postwar Charleston of starvation and white terrorism. There’s Philadelphia’s Black elite through a variety of eras, including the period in which thriving Black businesses provided money for abolitionist causes, stops on the Underground Railroad, and speaking sites for Frederick Douglass, as well as the nadir of lynching and white riots that marked the end of reconstruction. There’s wealthy Black slave brokers and investors in slave plantations marrying into prominent Philadelphia abolitionist families and using the profits of the buying and selling of human beings to fund abolitionist efforts. There’s even briefly the Dominican Republic, although Greenidge’s treatment of that context is remarkably shallow even in the context of a pretty shallow book. The various branches of the Grimkes and associated families intersect with abolitionist activism and Black self-organizing across times, locations, and ideologies. Some of the conflicts and inflection points here are familiar: Sarah and Angelina Grimke were involved in suffragette organizations that took part in the conflict over whether to endorse the 15th Amendment without including women, which notoriously led Elizabeth Cady Stanton to abandon her alliances with Black organizations and issue a series of virulent rants about the injustice of educated Anglo women being subject to the governance of “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Ting.” Others are less well known and feel like they deserve a lot more time and analysis than Greenidge gives them. The rendition of Anthony Burns, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and made it to Boston only to be returned to bondage and whose kidnapping by New England authorities sparked a protest that included masses of abolitionists physically blockading the jail to keep him from being removed, is reduced to a minor psychodrama in the life of a Grimke in-law that “soured him on New England.”

It's rich material, and it’s well-researched, but Greenidge just doesn’t do much with it. I would have liked a deeper engagement with the conflict among abolitionist societies in Philadelphia and exploration of their animating political commitments, which would involve a lot more sustained consideration of primary sources than Greenidge includes here. One notable thing about this book is that there is almost never a quote from a primary source longer than one complete sentence. Greenidge returns a few times to a quote from a Black woman activist, Frances Harper Watkins, dismissing white women’s suffrage demands as “airy nothings and selfishness.” This plays well as a zinger, I guess, but the speech from which it comes is an absolutely fascinating piece of rhetoric that deserves a full airing! In the absence of analysis of different modes of political action or philosophy over time, or of full evocations of times and places (Charlotte Forten’s experience as a teacher taking part in the wartime experiment with Black self-organization in South Carolina’s Sea Islands gets two pages; Archibald Grimke’s time in the Dominican Republic gets six), Greenidge relies heavily on psychoanalyzing her subjects’ feelings about their social positions. Most of her conclusions fit into existing cliches: the white Grimke sisters were more comfortable seeing Black people as masses needing to be saved than as individuals with their own opinions; Archibald and Francis Grimke had madonna/whore complexes about Black women; Archibald Grimke’s wealthy daughter, also called Angelina, had a condescending attitude toward poor Black people. White feminism, respectability politics, etc. No doubt a lot of these conclusions are true, but they’re not well supported in the text. For example, Greenidge claims that Charlotte Forten believed that her family “were known for their unblemished and unimpeachable chastity and for their ability to distinguish themselves from the sexual exploitation of their Southern sisters.” This claim that is supported only by a quote from a family friend describing Charlotte’s people as “a family of colored Puritans,” which hardly seems like enough to substantiate the claim of bigotry toward Black women who suffered the worst forms of sexual abuse. Greenidge claims that Archibald's daughter Angelina "Nana" Grimke saw the failures of her uncle John, who did not succeed in establishing himself among the Black elite as his brothers did, as a “sign of racial weakness that could appear at any moment to send her down a path of destruction.” There’s a citation, but no quote in the text to demonstrate this, except that the phrases “colored people” and “negro masses” appear in quotes in the next sentence, but it’s not at all clear what Greenidge is quoting from. If Nana, who was a prolific writer, really did feel stalked by racial ghosts, wouldn’t it be interesting to hear her express it in her own words? Wouldn’t some sort of primary evidence let the reader experience this in a framework outside of 21st century race relations cliches? Greenidge also makes much of Francis Grimke’s “color consciousness” and “fetishization” of his own light complexion. The main evidence she offers for this is that he sometimes called one of his friends at Princeton “the blackest man I have ever seen,” in reference to a white student’s comment, and that he helped to expel a “very black” congregant from his church who was accused of immorality. Again, I don’t think it’s implausible that dark-complected church women were held to different standards and punished in different ways than lighter women, but wouldn’t it be valuable to see some contemporary discussion of the issue? How was this prejudice actually constructed, and what purpose did those who engaged in it think they were serving? Along the same lines, I think it’s a little frustrating that Greenidge dismisses Angelina and Sarah Grimke’s concern for the spiritual damnation of white slave owners as an indication that they only really cared about white welfare. They were really religious! They really believed in hell! Is it impossible that that belief shaped their moral world in a way that was not solely a shield for racism? Again, I’m not saying that any of the claims Greenidge makes are wrong or not plausible; it seems very likely that she’s right that the Grimke sisters, while sincerely appalled by slavery, were never really prepared to engage with Black people as equals. But she sheds very little new light on this dynamic. The whole endeavor is not at all helped by the five-paragraph-essay quality of the prose, e.g.: “Unlike the activist great-aunts she never met and in contrast to Aunt Lottie whom she barely knew despite years spent under the same roof, Nana was unconcerned with platitudes of humanity’s deliverance from its sins or the race’s entitlement to justice. Rather, Nana was concerned with something more personal--the effects of unfulfilled platitutes and the denial of justice on a colored elite more concerned with racial respectability and material success than the long-term effects of the brutal history from which they came.”

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenidge merits high praise for a providing a comprehensive and highly textured analysis of a large number of people. These include the white Grimke sisters, their parents and siblings; two of the three Black Grimke sons as well as their mother and one of their offspring; and a number of other freed African Americans such as the Fortens and the Purvises of Philadelphia who interacted with and in one instance (Lottie Forten) married one of the Black Grimke sons (Francis).

She accomplished this through a very impressive review of such primary sources as the correspondence and diaries of many of these individuals. As one would hope for in a scholarly text there are 59 pages of notes and an index at the end of The Grimkes. There is no bibliography, unfortunately.

On the one hand, the book was well organized into a systematic narrative. On the other hand, there are times when it got to be to be so detailed as to be slow going. The use of lengthy, complex compound sentences also detracted from the book’s readability, IMHO.

To her credit the author provided a ‘cast of characters’ at the start of book which included 17 people. It must be noted, however, that there are many more people whose lives, roles in, and relationships with the Grimke family are discussed: so many, in fact, that it got difficult to keep track of them all.

The 13 photos in the book helped me to visualize some of the people discussed. While Greenidge provided a lot of description of most of the other people, it would have been better had the publisher included more photos.

Despite these relative flaws I recommend TG for those wishing to gain a thorough and nuanced grasp of the psychosocial impact which slavery and its aftermath had on white and African American people in the USA well into the 20th century. With great insight Greenidge accurately described, but never actually labeled, what one would call inter generational trauma.

The following is an article about Francis Grimke’s views of African Americans in society.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...

Addendum (12/19/22): the following is a talk that Greenidge gave about the book on Book TV on 11/15/22. It is quite informative.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?524262-...

[Salamah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greenidge provides a really in depth look at one family the Grimkes which was really two different families due to the institution of slavery in America. The white Grimkes were slaveholders who had considerable wealth, while the Black Grimkes fought like heck to carve a life out for themselves. This book tells all the family members stories. One focus was on the famous Grimke sisters Angelina and Sarah who I always knew were abolitionists but in this book we see them in another light. Even though they hated slavery, this still felt a certain disdain for African American people. Another focus was on their nephews, Archi, John and Frank who were enslaved as children but later on became active members of society. Archi and Frank did very well for themselves according to Greenidge. Angelina Grimke (the Black one) also was a focus as she seems to be the last living member until her death. She went against the grain and lived her own life on her own accord. This book is a bit academic and at times it was hard to keep track of all the family members. I also wish the book had more pictures so that I could put a name to a face. Overall a good historical read.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book examines the story of one family across three generations, from the late Colonial period to the early Twentieth Century, and examines the impact they had on the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and the impacts these issues had on the members of the family. Because of this sweeping scope, it packs a lot of information into a relatively short text of just over 300 pages (the book include almost 100 pages of notes and index), which makes this a little bit of a chore to read, which is complicated by the number of people involved. I had some trouble trying to keep track of who some of the people were, and how they were related. The story begins with the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of wealthy Charleston planters and slave owners who came to believe that slavery was a sin and ultimately moved to the North and became outspoken advocates of abolition. But their brother fathered sons with one of their slaves, and after they finally became free following the Civil War, they became important figures in the "Colored Elite" of the Reconstruction period. The final generation is represented by Angelina Weld Grimke, daughter of one of the former slaves, who became a prominent Black poet at the turn of the century. Also included in this portrait are the free black families of the women who would marry the black Grimke men, showing how their connections helped place these men into their positions of influence.

One of the main themes of this narrative is how each generation's world view and prejudices impacted their actions and influenced the next generation. The Grimke sisters primary view of slavery as a sin meant that their abolitionist views were about atonement for their family's sins, rather than focused on the effects of slavery on the people subjected to it. Their later support for their black nephews was tainted by their demands that they restore honor to the family name, making them highly critical of any perceived shortcomings. Those nephews, in turn, envisioned an elite Black culture that made a clean break with the past, and thus failed to account for the lasting trauma that slavery had inflicted on the greater black community. And all of this suppressed and undiscussed trauma and history weighed heavily on the final generation. Poet Angelina Weld Grimke struggled with the demands that she live up to a idealized vision of black womanhood that did not support her literary ambitions or desires.

The glimpses into these periods of history, and the paternalistic nature of much of the abolitionist movement and the color biases that surfaced in the generation of black elites in the postbellum period shed light on some of the issues we continue to struggle with today. While this book is focused on a single family, it really is an exploration of the ways in which American culture has failed to honestly address deep, underlying issues in our race relations. Which makes it an important book, even if it is a bit of a chore to read.

[Rama Rao · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two Nanas; the legacy of Grimke's struggle for abolition and women’s rights (five stars)

This book explores the racial and political history of the extended family of white Grimke sisters; Sarah, and Angelina Grimke born in a slave-holding family in Charleston, South Carolina, later become antislavery revolutionaries and pioneers for women's rights in the 1820s. This work highlights the significance of Grimke's three African American nephews and their families. The Grimke sisters’ older brother, Henry had three sons from an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston. The sisters take the responsibilities of caring their nephews and shape their future with good education who later become prominent members the African American community.

The life of the white Grimke sisters is not free from the sin for their racial paternalism. The sisters could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality, when their Black nephews did not adhere to images of a how an enslaved person must behave towards white women. They were harsh and shrewd that reflects on the limits of white racial politics during early America. This story is masterpiece of hope, the quest for freedom, for redemption, and for a voice in the nation during a devastating time in American history and how it has shaped the lives of African Americans in 21st century. In this journey, the two sisters strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement, and the uneasy ways of love. The two sisters were undeterred by the harsh criticism for their activism but also had significant influence on the lives of their nephews and their families.

This work focuses on the work of two Nana’s from Grimke’s household, one black and one white; Angelina “Nana” Weld Grimke (1880 – 1958), an African American journalist, playwright, and poet was born to Archibald Grimke; and Angelina Nana Grimke Hamilton (1872-1947), a white Nana, born to Sara Grimke Hamilton and William Hamilton, the granddaughter of Grimke family’s matriarch Angelina Grimke. The book contrasts the legacies of the two women, the black Nana was inspired by the challenges they faced in a dominantly white world and reflected on the pain, suffering and rage of the colored elite and the impact on other less fortunate people with enslaved legacy. But the white Nana was a medical doctor from the University of Michigan who lived to exalt Grimke family for the unassailable service offered to the oppressed people. She never spoke of the slavery practiced by her white grandparents in South Carolina, nor did she have any empathy for the economically and socially challenged African Americans.

The author narrates the story of Grimke’s with passion and illuminates how their legacy has helped shape racial activism. Strongly recommended to readers interested in African American history, and abolition movement.