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.
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