Greenidge, Kerri K.

Kerri K. Greenidge is a historian at Tufts University and the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, winner of the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other honors. 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 story have long obscured their Black relatives. 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. Greenidge follows their exploits in the North, but her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, including Francis’ wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, and Archibald’s daughter, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke. The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright) offers a 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.