The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

NYT Book Review article By

Michael P. Jeffries - Oct. 29, 2022

Slavery’s Indelible Stain on a White Abolitionist Legend

“The Grimkes,” by the historian Kerri Greenidge, provides a nuanced, revisionist account of an American family best known for a pair of white abolitionist sisters.

THE GRIMKES: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, by Kerri K. Greenidge

Born at the turn of the 19th century, the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, left their slaveholding family in Charleston, S.C., as young adults and made new lives for themselves as abolitionists in the North. In 1838, Angelina became the first woman to speak before a legislative body in the United States when she addressed the Massachusetts Legislature and called for an immediate end to slavery.

In the same speech, she made a passionate case for women’s rights, insisting that women belonged at the center of major political debates. “Are we aliens because we are women?” she asked. “Are we bereft of citizenship because we are the mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people?”

The Grimke sisters became celebrities, publishing essays that shaped abolitionist thinking and reluctantly stepping into a male-dominated public sphere where they were never completely welcome. Their fame derived from both their words and their deeds. They rejected their white inheritance by coming north and joining the movement, gaining moral credibility that few of their peers could match.

But in her new book, “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” the historian Kerri Greenidge challenges this narrative, showing that the sisters’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery. The lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence and shame of white supremacy.

“The Grimkes” is a family biography. In addition to the stories of Sarah Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld, it recounts the lives of their Black nephews, Archibald (Archie), Frank and John; Frank’s wife, Lottie Forten Grimke; and Archie’s daughter, the Harlem Renaissance writer Angelina Weld Grimke. It’s 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 guides readers through life in Charleston, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C., with episodes that begin in the 1790s and end in the early 20th century. She explores the contradictions of American ideas about freedom, highlighting that among white people, racial progress almost never implies Black self-determination or true equality.

And she paints an unsparing portrait of the Black elite as an anxious and aloof vanguard whose well-intended brand of racial activism never truly addressed the problems of the Black masses.

While all these facets are compelling, the book’s most affecting contribution is Greenidge’s treatment of intergenerational racial trauma. What exactly does “the legacy of slavery” mean? Two indisputable features of this legacy are enforced poverty and subjection to state violence, which have clear effects on Black people’s wealth, health and happiness.

But there is also a more amorphous sense of the psychological trauma of slavery and racism that is not so easily described. Society has changed and more recent generations of Black Americans have not faced the brutality and dehumanization of bondage. So how does the trauma of that era ripple across time and space?

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. Within the Grimke family, the agony did not spread evenly across divisions of race, gender, sexuality and generation, but it mutated and endured.

So many Grimkes stubbornly tried to minimize the violence of the past in the pursuit of achievement and respect. Time and again, the pressure to attain social standing coincided with intense shame of Blackness, womanhood and Black womanhood.

Sarah Grimke was born in 1792, her sister Angelina in 1805. The Grimkes’ home and the city of Charleston were colored by a fear of Black savagery that was a projection of white men’s proclivity for raping Black women and destroying Black families.

Sarah apprehended the sickness of slavery at an early age, though she initially understood slavery as a sin that she had to atone for rather than a problem that could be solved only by empowering Black people.

When Sarah moved to Philadelphia in 1821 and joined a Quaker community, she grasped that personal repentance was insufficient, and, following Angelina’s lead, began to make a case for abolition that was too radical even for the Quakers who influenced her thinking.

Sarah had been a mother figure to Angelina, who joined her older sister in Philadelphia in 1829. Angelina developed a different approach to abolition, with a more acute focus on white supremacy as an arbitrary and reprehensible political system, rather than a personal moral affliction.

Both sisters were affected by the community of Black abolitionists who were already hard at work when they arrived in Philadelphia. But alliances between Black and white women at the center of abolitionist activism were short-lived.

As Greenidge writes, “White reformers’ dedication to Black people as a moral obligation to be fulfilled did not always translate into a belief that Black people were intellectually and politically capable.”

Back in Charleston, Sarah and Angelina’s brother Henry stayed true to Grimke family tradition. He became a lawyer and slaveholder, and had six children: three with his white wife, Selina, and three with an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston.

Nancy was light-skinned compared with many of her kin, and she raised her three sons — Archie, Frank and John — with a sense of distinction rooted in their separation from their darker and more degraded Black brethren.

But Archie, Frank and John were still enslaved, and they were subject to heinous abuse at the hands of their white half brother Montague, who viciously beat them, among other punishments, until, with the Confederacy’s defeat in Charleston in 1864, he was forced to flee the city.

After the Union victory, Archie and Frank went north and received assistance from the Freedmen’s Union Commission. John followed, but fell out of contact with his brothers, eventually becoming estranged from the rest of the family.

Sarah and Angelina decided to sponsor their Black nephews’ education and integration into polite society. They laid a path for Archie and Frank to join the Black elite, W.E.B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” charged with uplifting the masses and embodying respectability.

This financial and social sponsorship, like the Grimke sisters’ political activities, was made possible by their family’s wealth.

Despite their public calls for abolition, they never demanded that Henry release the people he enslaved or compensate them for their labor. While Greenidge cannot confirm that Henry raped Nancy, she argues that at the very least Nancy was coerced and unable to resist assault.

Instead of attending to Nancy, Sarah and Angelina urged their Black nephews to forget about the past and focus on the future the sisters envisioned for them.

Archie became a lawyer and diplomat in Boston, and, later, a national vice president of the N.A.A.C.P.; Frank became a pastor and leader of the Black church in Washington, D.C. Archie and Frank repressed their suffering and worked their way up the social hierarchy.

But neither fully healed from the wounds of their enslavement and the denigration of their mother. The respectability they aspired to was saturated with sexist Victorian morality, colorism and white ideals of intellect and propriety.

This legacy of trauma is painstakingly illustrated in Greenidge’s final two chapters, dedicated to Archie’s daughter, Angelina “Nana” Weld Grimke, who was born in 1880 and died in 1958. Nana, a queer Black woman who showed immense talent as a poet from an early age, chafed against her family’s wishes for her.

She was a gifted writer but a poor student, who openly carried on romantic affairs with girls and women through adolescence and early adulthood. Her rebelliousness did not lead to happiness. She could never live up to Archie’s expectations, and she never recovered from being abandoned by her white mother, who had left Archie and moved to Michigan, when Nana was just 7 years old.

Through a close reading of Nana’s letters, poems and one of her plays, Greenidge reveals an artist cursed and driven by longing: for familial and romantic love without shame, and for release from the shackles of patriarchy and racism.

There is plenty of little-known American history in “The Grimkes,” but no blow-by-blow accounts of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the other major national events that shaped the family’s evolution.

Similarly, while Greenidge provides context for the Grimke sisters’ contributions to abolition and the nascent women’s rights movement, she does not make forceful arguments about how the sisters influenced the trajectory of those movements, or what would have been different without them.

Instead, she offers an intimate and provocative account of a family’s intergenerational struggle to remake itself.

She 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.