The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké

by Charlotte Forten Grimké, Brenda Stevenson (Editor)

Born into an affluent and politically active black family, Charlotte Forten Grimk'e (1837-1914) was a scholar, reformer, teacher and writer. Her journals describe her privileged childhood, her sporadic teaching career, her involvement with the anti-slavery movement, her eighteen months teaching the contraband slaves of the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War and her later work as poet and essayist. Thanks to her keen observation and meticulous accounts of the people and events that shaped her life, her journals provide a unique and personal view of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, African American, Collections, Memoir, Race

672 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1961

About the author

Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten Grimké (August 17, 1837 – July 23, 1914) was an African-American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the war to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and active in civil rights.

Her diaries written before the end of the Civil War have been published in numerous editions in the 20th century and are significant as a rare record of the life of a free black woman in the North in the antebellum years.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Tom]

I refuse to rate someone’s diary, but this was a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day of a middle-class Black woman before and during the Civil War. Plus she crossed paths with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Tubman – what a life!

She could also write with uncommon power about racism. Check out this banger:

I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind. I have met girls in the schoolroom[—]they have been thoroughly kind and cordial to me,—perhaps the next day met them in the street—they feared to recognize me; these I can but regard now with scorn and contempt,—once I liked them, believing them incapable of such meanness. Others give the most distant recognitions possible.—I, of course, acknowledge no such recognitions, and they soon cease entirely. These are but trifles, certainly, to the great, public wrongs which we as a people are obliged to endure. But to those who experience them, these apparent trifles are most wearing and discouraging; even to the child’s mind they reveal volumes of deceit and heartlessness, and early teach a lesson of suspicion and distrust. Oh! it is hard to go through life meeting contempt with contempt, hatred with hatred, fearing, with too good reason, to love and trust hardly any one whose skin is white,—however lovable, attractive and congenial in seeming. In the bitter, passionate feelings of my soul again and again there rises the questions “When, oh! when shall this cease?” “Is there no help?” “How long oh! how long must we continue to suffer—to endure?” Conscience answers it is wrong, it is ignoble to despair; let us labor earnestly and faithfully to acquire knowledge, to break down the barriers of prejudice and oppression. Let us take courage; never ceasing to work,—hoping and believing that if not for us, for another generation there is a better, brighter day in store,—when slavery and prejudice shall vanish before the glorious light of Liberty and Truth; when the rights of every colored man shall everywhere be acknowledged and respected, and he shall be treated as a man and a brother.

Written when she was just 18!

[Humberto · Rating 1 out of 5]

An anecdotal account of the late antebellum period in america. the author is perhaps the most inane person i have ever read. avoid.