Americas
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The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award [Biography]
New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022
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 sons: 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 equality: 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. 12 black-and-white illustrations
New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022
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 sons: 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 equality: 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. 12 black-and-white illustrations
Editorial Reviews
"[A] revelatory investigation . . . Like Annette Gordon-Reed's Pulitzer-winning The Hemingses of Monticello, Greenidge illuminates the dynamic of racial subordination within a slaveholding family . . . brilliant."
― Elizabeth Taylor, National Book Critics Circle
"An ambitious book, not only because of its large cast of characters, but because it offers so many insights about racial strife in the United States . . . Greenidge provides a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating through an adept use of the family's letters, diaries and other archival materials, how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition . . . There is plenty of little-known American history in The Grimkes . . . An intimate and provocative account of a family's intergenerational struggle to remake itself. [Greenidge] takes the Grimke sisters off their pedestal so that we understand them as pieces of a tapestry that could only be sewn in America. Pain, guilt and yearning lie at the seams, holding the family together and tearing it apart."
― Michael P. Jeffries, New York Times Book Review, cover review
"Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke were two of America's most well-known abolitionists, inspired to speak out against slavery by their Quaker faith. But the story of their family goes even deeper – their brother was a cruel sadist who fathered three children with an enslaved woman. Historian Kerri K. Greenidge digs deep into the history of the family, both its white and Black members, and the result is a fascinating examination of the legacy of slavery in America. This beautifully written book isn't just important; it's actually essential."
― Michael Schaub, NPR, Best Books of 2022
"[T]he historical record offers occasional glimpses into the tortured dynamics of families ‘Black and white.' Annette Gordon-Reed's acclaimed work on Jefferson ranks as one of the most notable of these explorations. But the history of another southern lineage, which Kerri K. Greenidge examines in her new book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slaveryin an American Family, is perhaps even more revealing of the way human bondage shaped and deformed families, as well as the lives of those within them. . . . [Greenidge] highlights the crucial role of Black women in the abolitionist struggle . . . In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars ...
― Elizabeth Taylor, National Book Critics Circle
"An ambitious book, not only because of its large cast of characters, but because it offers so many insights about racial strife in the United States . . . Greenidge provides a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating through an adept use of the family's letters, diaries and other archival materials, how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition . . . There is plenty of little-known American history in The Grimkes . . . An intimate and provocative account of a family's intergenerational struggle to remake itself. [Greenidge] takes the Grimke sisters off their pedestal so that we understand them as pieces of a tapestry that could only be sewn in America. Pain, guilt and yearning lie at the seams, holding the family together and tearing it apart."
― Michael P. Jeffries, New York Times Book Review, cover review
"Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke were two of America's most well-known abolitionists, inspired to speak out against slavery by their Quaker faith. But the story of their family goes even deeper – their brother was a cruel sadist who fathered three children with an enslaved woman. Historian Kerri K. Greenidge digs deep into the history of the family, both its white and Black members, and the result is a fascinating examination of the legacy of slavery in America. This beautifully written book isn't just important; it's actually essential."
― Michael Schaub, NPR, Best Books of 2022
"[T]he historical record offers occasional glimpses into the tortured dynamics of families ‘Black and white.' Annette Gordon-Reed's acclaimed work on Jefferson ranks as one of the most notable of these explorations. But the history of another southern lineage, which Kerri K. Greenidge examines in her new book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slaveryin an American Family, is perhaps even more revealing of the way human bondage shaped and deformed families, as well as the lives of those within them. . . . [Greenidge] highlights the crucial role of Black women in the abolitionist struggle . . . In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars ...
Readers Top Reviews
Michelle "DalaiMo
It's so much I don't really think any of my thoughts could do this book justice. Far better thorough reviews out there for this book. All I can say is that it's thick with history and information. It can get difficult at times to navigate and absorb but it's worth doing so. The Grimke sisters are known for many things. First off, I don't believe I had ever heard of them or read about them in school that I can recollect. So much is about them and what they did and stood for in this book. Activists for abolition, feminists, intelligent, and came from family money as well as being owners of slaves. The book explains their removal of this wealthy 'lifestyle' and goes on to narrate that journey and struggle. It's a lot. A powerful read. Violent, dark, sickening to read and grasp the brutality of what so many black men, women, and children lived and died through. There's so much depth in the lives of the Grimke sisters, more than just their activism. A lot of history in this one book. Again, difficult to get through but very much worth the read.
Diane KMichelle "
....that I wish all people would read, particularly those debating or worse, refuting critical race theory. There were so many key characters, relationships and time periods that it was a little difficult to keep track. This was a dense and challenging read.
Barbara JesraniDi
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.
Robert D. HarmonB
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...
John P. CraigIan
This is a book I will have to read and rereading times. There is so much information to ingest, it's too hard to do so in one read. I come away from this story very impressed with its scholarship and rigorous research.
