Review by Choice Review
The Grimkes is a biography of the famous multiracial Grimke family, examining the lives of the white, abolitionist Grimke sisters Sarah and Angelina and their Black nephews, Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke. The text also explores Francis's wife Charlotte Forten Grimke and Angelina Weld Grimke, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance author and daughter to Archibald. Greenidge (Tufts Univ.) examines how slavery and racial violence within this family affected its members, especially the women. She also looks at how, while this legacy may have encouraged some family members to form interracial alliances like that of the Grimke sisters and their nephews, this did not erase ideas of white supremacy within the family or in the US at large. The book spans North and South and covers a broad time span as well, providing readers with a good sense of national race relations from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. Well organized, with a helpful cast of characters at the beginning, Greenidge's work succeeds in telling the story of a prominent American family that, like the US, grappled with the legacy of slavery. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty. --Tammy Kae Byron, Dalton State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Sarah and Angelina Grimke are iconic nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists and women's suffrage activists. Raised in the South Carolina slavocracy, they courted controversy with their antislavery and feminist views and became the darlings of elite Philadelphia radicals. Yet as historian Greenidge (Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, 2019) makes abundantly clear, the Grimkes remained mired in racism and classism, and their dedication to eradicating slavery had more to do with gratifying their own Christian views than with actually helping Black people. Greenidge skillfully contrasts the simpering piety of the Grimkes with the fierce determination of leaders in the free Black community, notably the descendants of legendary Black entrepreneur James Forten. His granddaughter, Charlotte, chafed at the hypocrisy of Quaker abolitionists like the Grimkes, who denounced Southern slavery while ignoring the virulent racism and violence threatening Black Philadelphians. After the Civil War, when the Grimkes learned that their brother (a sadistic abuser) had fathered three sons with an enslaved woman, the sisters treated their nephews, Archibald, Francis, and John, not as equals to be loved but rather as burdens to be endured. Nor would they take pains to rescue the boys' mother from the violent Southern backlash against former slaves. A sobering and timely look at how self-centered "benevolence" can become complicity.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tufts University historian Greenidge (Black Radical) delivers a revelatory study of the Grimke family and their complicated involvement in the fight for racial equality. Quaker sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, suffering from spiritual guilt over slavery--yet willing to receive financial support from their slaveholding relatives--relocated from Charleston, S.C., to Philadelphia in the 1820s and became influential abolitionists and women's rights activists who emphasized the detrimental effects of the "peculiar institution" on white women's souls. After the Civil War, they learned that their brother Henry had fathered three sons by an enslaved woman, and Greenidge incisively details how the sisters' relationships with their nephews, Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke, got tangled up in assumptions of white privilege and assertions of Black freedom. Also spotlighted are Francis Grimke's wife, Charlotte Forten Grimke, a writer and teacher whose paternal grandmother and aunts cofounded one of America's first abolitionist women's organizations and frequently clashed with white women over ideology and tactics, and Archibald's daughter, Harlem Renaissance playwright Angelina Weld Grimke, who promoted the concept of racial uplift, popular among middle- and upper-class Blacks as they distanced themselves from the poor and uneducated in pursuit of racial equality. Greenidge offers no tidy or optimistic conclusions about the long shadow of slavery, but readers will be riveted by how she brings these complex figures and their era to life. This is a brilliant and essential history. Illus. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke famously left South Carolina to preach abolition in the North. But as highlighted by award-winning historian Greenidge (Black Radical), their brother remained on the family plantation and sired several children with an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston. Limning the contributions of the Black Grimke women and the U.S. tendency to mythologize.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A multigenerational history of an American family that grappled with racism and reform. Award-winning historian Greenidge offers an absorbing investigation of two branches of the notable Grimke family: sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who became famous for their views on abolition and women's suffrage; and the descendants of their brother Henry Grimke, a "notoriously violent and sadistic" slave owner who fathered three sons with a Black woman he owned. Drawing on abundant archival sources, the author follows the fortunes of each side of the family as Sarah, Angelina, and Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina's husband, positioned themselves within the anti-slavery movement, and Henry Grimke's sons Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the nation's "colored elite." Archibald, a Harvard-educated lawyer, became a co-founder of the Washington, D.C., branch of the NAACP; Francis studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and became the Presbyterian minister of a D.C. church. Guilt led the White Grimkes to be revulsed by slavery: The sisters' father had owned more than 300, and the girls witnessed the slaves' merciless treatment at the hands of their parents and brothers. At first, the sisters supported African colonization. Blacks would be happier if they left America, they believed; eventually, however, their views shifted to abolition. Like many other White Americans, they saw the abolition movement as a path to personal redemption and considered Blacks to be "objects of reform" rather than equals worthy of respect. Racism, however, was not limited to the White Grimkes. The Black branch of the family, invested in their belief in racial respectability and material success, distinguished themselves from the "negro masses" whose behavior, values, and prospects they disdained. Greenidge reveals the significant roles of Black women in the family's complicated history: the sons' mother, wives, and in-laws; and, notably, Archie's daughter, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke. The author's discoveries reveal both "white reformers' disavowal of their complicity in America's racial project" and "the limits of interracial alliances." A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
