The Grimkes
“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.”
New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick in Memoirs
A New York Times Notable Book of 2022
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
A Smithsonian Magazine Pick of the Year's Best Books
An Oprah Daily Pick of 2022's Best Books
A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
An NPR Best Book of 2022
A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best
Winner of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
A stunning counter–narrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family
The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite, slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand abolitionists in the North. Yet the focus on their story has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives, the progeny of their brother, Henry, and one of the enslaved people he owned, a woman named Nancy Weston.
In The Grimkes, award–winning historian Kerri K. Greenidge recovers the larger Grimke clan, demonstrating that the Black Grimke women—including Angelina Weld Grimke and Charlotte Forten—created a vast network of friends, kin, and lovers as they reimagined Blackness and womanhood in terms far more radical than their white relatives would have allowed.
A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes shows that, just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of America’s founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths.
Praise