Dr. Kerri Greenidge on "The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family"

 

Jane Kamensky:

Good evening, everyone. I'm thrilled to welcome you here for the first time in 2025. I'm Jane Kamensky, and I'm the president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and you're in for a real treat in a program that is a triple threat tonight. So, first of all, Dr. Greenidge's conversation Inaugurates our Spring 2025 Pursuits of Knowledge series, and we have other events in that series forthcoming on March 11th when two leaders of the Smithsonian will talk about their efforts in women's history during Women's History Month. On April 14th, Dr. Jonathan Gienapp of Stanford is talking about his already notice-attracting book Against Constitutional Originalism. On May 6th, we have Howard Ginsburg's play, Jefferson & Adams, with our own Bill Barker playing Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Schuman and Sam Goodyear playing Abigail and John, and a special June Pursuits of Knowledge forthcoming announcement as part of a robust civic season of programming in June.

So, that's the first leg of the triple threat. The second is that the program tonight kicks off our Black History Month programming, which celebrates African-American history as American history, and of course as Monticello's history. In addition to tonight's conversation, we'll be featuring a curator's talk on February 14th, where our curator of arts and history, Emily Johnson, will discuss a revolving tabletop crafted by enslaved carpenters and the joiner, John Hemmings. An archeology open house on April 15th featuring displays of artifacts and information about recent excavations, hands-on activities for all ages. And then, in partnership with the Jefferson School and its African-American Heritage Center, a Black Family History Lab on February 21st and 22nd. Finally, tonight's conversation is also the annual very special Leonard Sadosky lecture, commemorating a brilliant young historian who died before his time in 2018. And it's now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Robert Parkinson, who will share some words about Professor Sadosky and his legacy, and introduce our speaker and her interlocutor, and Kerri Greenidge is selected as somebody whose profile as a rising star fits this particular lecture.

Rob Parkinson is currently the Kundrun Fellow here in residence at Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies. He is a scholar of early American history and professor of history at Binghamton University in New York. His award-winning books include The Common Cause, published in 2016, 13 Clocks in 2021, and most recently, The Heart of American Darkness published just last year, which the notoriously stingy Kirkus Reviews called, "A scarifying, blood-soaked portrait of savagery on the early American frontier, much of it committed by European settlers. Superb." Our thanks to Rob for his help in introducing the proceedings tonight, and in inviting so many of Professor Sadosky's friends to be present at the conversation. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Rob.

Rob Parkinson:

Thank you. Thank you Jane, for that. That was more than deserved. So, I entered the University of Virginia in 1999, which I am sad to say was 25 years ago. And my first meeting-

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

26.

Rob Parkinson:

Well not yet, but yes. We're still on 25 in the fall. My first meeting with my advisor, the well-known in this community, Peter Onuf, said to me, "I had a student that came in a couple of years before, two years ago, and he has been extraordinarily successful and he's blowing the doors off this place. You be the new Leonard," is what he said to me. So, I did, as much as I possibly could be, and I got to know Leonard Sadosky. He was not only a serious student, but a very, very good person and we became pretty close friends. They were really excellent years there, this is from 1999 through the early aughts, as they say, not for everybody.

I remember Leonard saying to me that Monday, September 10th, 2001 was the best dissertation research day he'd ever had. "And if I have more days like this, I'll get this thing done in six weeks," which of course the next morning was derailed everything for everybody all over the place. Those are really excellent years, and we were a tight cohort here at UVA pulling for one another. I remember specifically, now Shannon Library but it used to be called Alderman Library at the time, I remember being there the very last minutes on December 23rd as the place was closing, and there were eight people in the building and six of them were Onuf students who were trying to desperately try to check out more books. And we were there to try to impress the dude, as he was known, Peter, but we were really there for one another. 

In the 15 years after that, after Leonard had left academia, we remained close. We talked on the phone a couple of times a month, mostly about sports podcasts and who was on, and how we wanted to talk about that. In baseball season that was great because we were both fans of the Red Sox, and football season, not so much. He was a big fan of the New England Patriots and I was not. Go Steelers. Seven years ago, in the middle of January, I texted Leonard and said, "How are you feeling about today's playoff game with the Patriots?" And this picture was his response. 12 days later he was gone.

Looking at this, and I looked at the information about this photo and I downloaded it to my hard drive seven years ago today actually, on February 4th, because I did not want to lose this and I renamed it Leonard last photo, and I made sure I would never lose it and that's why I wanted to show it to you. So, his Patriots hat, this was my very good friend in the last few days of his life. And although Leonard has much missed, his memory lives on in the publications that he wrote, especially his book, which I still see cited all over the place, Revolutionary Negotiations, published with UVA Press, and this lecture series for which we are very grateful to continue tonight. With much appreciation to Jane, and the ICJS and Monticello staff, we have an excellent conversation for you tonight that he would've been thrilled to attend.

So with that, let me introduce tonight's speakers. Kerri Greenidge comes to us from Tufts University in Boston where she is Mellon associate professor and the co-director of Tufts Slavery Colonization and their Legacies project, which sounds very cool. Her 2019 book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, received a number of awards and rave reviews, including the prestigious Mark Lynton Prize in History. In 2022 she published, with Live Right, the Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, which we'll be talking about tonight. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe all had it on their best books of the year lists. And it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which is no slouch, and the L.A. Times Book Award.

She will be discussing these legacies of enslavement and their entanglements with family and families tonight, with Dr. Andrew Davenport, VP for research and Saunders director at the Robert Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Andrew has formerly been director of the Getting Word Oral History Project here at Monticello, and has published essays in Lantham's Quarterly, and the L.A. Review of Books, and Smithsonian Magazine and many, many more to come. So, with no further ado let me welcome our two speakers for tonight, our conversationalists, as it were, to the stage. Yes? Good.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Good evening. Can everyone hear us?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yep. Oh, goodness. Yes.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Oh, great. So wonderful to be in conversation with Dr. Kerri Greenidge, and to be with so many friends and so many friends of Leonard's, and thank you Rob and to Jane. And Kerri, your work, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family shows that we are each other, and in the long 19th century as in our own, we forget this at our peril. Instead of family trees, anthropologists tell us to think about family trellises, and perhaps few American families are more representative of this, outside of the Jefferson Randolphs and the Hemingses, that is besides the Grimke family. As Jane Kamensky wrote about your book, The Grimkes, in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, you posed the question, "What lasting price did slavery extract from those who survived and fought to end it?"

But before we get to the answers, let's take a step back and learn a bit about you as a writer and as a historian. So, you're the author of three books of social history biography. What drew you to these far-ranging books in their casts of multitudes? What was your path to becoming a historian, and how does it interweave with your remarkable family history? I have little doubt that 100 years hence there'll be a book called The Greenidges.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Well first of all, thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. And to hear about Dr. Sadosky and be here on stage, it really is very, very warm ... It makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. So, thank you so much, and thank you to Jane Kamensky. I often say you get to see the people you read about and idolize when you do your graduate work, and they're like, "Oh my goodness, there she is." So, thank you so much for having me. I come at history as somebody who listened to my family talk about people who I didn't necessarily see in history books. As I said to the group earlier today, my grandfather was from Petersburg, Virginia, and spent some time coming between Petersburg and Charlottesville as a child. And he was somebody who adored history and adored researching history, even though he did not have a high school diploma.

And so, I remember him having all of these books on his shelf, and all of these little scraps from Black newspapers from the time he was a child, which I always want to shoot myself because I did not save those as a historian. And they were all over, so he had copies of The Guardian, which I wrote my first book on. He had copies of the crisis, of course, all of these things. And so, I always say that I came to history through that. And so, my grandfather would often talk about how what we saw in the '70s and '80s in New England, that there were actually Black people in these little spaces. And when I became a teenager, I roll my eyes because how many stories are there that, "Nobody knows except for you, Grandpa?" Type of thing. But it really drove me to when I went to undergraduate and started studying history, to really start to look for those stories as a way to be in conversation with the ones he told me as somebody who was not an academically trained historian.

And so for my first book, I first heard about William Monroe Trotter in my grandparents' house when I was about seven years old. And my grandmother told me, wrote down a piece of paper, "This is William Monroe Trotter, he was a race man," as they used to say. And she told me about the book that was written in 1970. And then, when I was in college I was one of those students, I always tell my students, I was one of those students who did not particularly like history until I got to undergraduate. And when I was an undergraduate student I really started to see that history is stories, and you can talk about people and communities. And so, I knew I wanted to write about Trotter, but I knew I had to go to graduate school to do it. So, I went to graduate school and then did the book.

And so, I think coming at history, I'm the middle of three sisters and my older sister is a playwright, a pretty successful one, she's the head of the school of theater at Boston University. My younger sister is a novelist. And all of us, even though we don't all do the same thing, we all like history is interwoven into all of the things that we do. And I think it really has to do with how we were brought up to see these stories that you might not see on the surface, but that definitely are in there. You just have to know how to look them, and you have to know how to look in the archive, and how to question what you're seeing. And also, then read the works of other historians to figure out how it's been analyzed before.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

And there's this terrific New York Times article about the Greenidge sisters, and I was just getting a front row glimpse into one of your recent car trips together for a sisters reading in New York City, but we won't get into that.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yes.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

We'll get into the Grimkes. We're talking about family history, genealogists tend to tell us to start from the most recent past and work your way backwards. And you do that in the opening of The Grimkes. You're talking about the two nanas. So, it's Angelina Grimke Hamilton, and Angelina Weld Grimke, and that's how you open the book, that's the introduction. Who were these women? What paths did they blaze? Where were they thwarted, and how did their family histories intertwine in Charleston, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Excellent question. So, Angelina Weld Hamilton was the daughter of Sarah Grimke Hamilton. Sarah Grimke Hamilton was the daughter of Angelina Grimke Weld, the famous abolitionist women's rights activist who wrote on behalf of women's rights and for anti-slavery in the 1830s. So, Sarah was her daughter, and so this is her granddaughter. And Angelina Weld Hamilton had a fascinating life of firsts. So, when I was researching her she was one of the first to receive a appointment to a mental health facility as a woman in the state of Illinois. It was located in Anna, Illinois, she's the first woman psychiatric nurse to be involved in that. And then she went, made her way to Utah at one point and opened up a school. So, she has this fabulous family history. And then, Angelina Weld Grimke is technically her second cousin. And Angelina Weld Grimke was the daughter of Archibald Grimke, born in the late 1840s, who was the son of Henry Grimke, slave holding man and brother to the famous Grimke sisters in the 1830s.

And so, Archibald Grimke was the Weld Grimke sisters' nephew. And so, Angelina Weld Grimke in the early 20th century was a poet, a very, very gifted and prolific writer, and somebody who became known during the Harlem Renaissance for her use of the type of poetry of E.E. Cummings, and the way she played with language, and this interpretive language. And she produced a play called Rachel, which was a very powerful anti-lynching play, the first produced written by a Black woman in 1917. And so, I begin the book with those two because I think they encapsulate what really fascinates me about this family, and really about when you just look at family history in general, which is that you can have all of these accomplishments and all of these firsts in a family, and the Grimkes family on all sides, white and Blacks, has all these firsts, pretty remarkable.

And yet, behind those are often these family, I wouldn't even call them secrets, but I think acceptances. And they struggled to try to overcome a past that none of them really understood. They understood it academically and as activists, but they didn't really understand the long-term effect of that activism. The Grimke family was from Charleston, South Carolina, the patriarch was a leading jurist in South Carolina during the American Revolution. The family patriarch basically discovers and found the way to create a constitution for the state of South Carolina. It still existed up through the Civil War. He had 12 children. He marries a woman named Mary Smith Grimke, and they go on to become these doyens of white, upper class slave holding society in Charleston. And within that you have the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, who go on to become women's rights activists and abolitionists.

And then, you also have the grandchildren, unacknowledged at the time grandchildren of the enslaved Grimke, Nancy Weston. And so, I'm really fascinated, I began the book with the two descendants of that who are two women, one Black, one white, both of them doing phenomenal things in their field, both of them leaders in their field, both of them are the firsts in a lot of ways. And yet they have this sordid history, and neither of them acknowledged each other ever publicly, even though they both have the same name. There is evidence, I didn't include in the book, that they crossed paths randomly. I mean, they don't meet, but it's cross. And the Grimke name at one time is known as this very famous name, both in Charleston and then in 19th century reform.

And then when you get to the 20th century, it's very well known in Harlem Renaissance circles. So I was really, as a roundabout way of saying, I really wanted to see what did it mean to be part of this family if you have the heavy burden of, one, exceptionalism, and number two, the legacies of how that family came to be, which was through slavery and very violent slave system in Charleston.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

And let's talk about that, because there's the story that the Grimkes on both sides of the color line tell about themselves, but then there's also the story that you reveal through your research and it begins in the low country in South Carolina. So, would you sketch that slave society for us and where the Grimkes power and affluence, and frankly their violence comes from?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yeah. So, both sides of the family, and this was one of the things that was so fascinating, it wasn't as if the white side of the family is denying slavery and the Black side of the family is saying slavery exists. That's not the story that exists. It really is that all of them believe in the myths that we tell about families all the time, which is why I like writing about families and communities, which is that as the story goes, the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, were part of this slave-holding family in Charleston, Sarah Grimke, or the story goes, suddenly converts to Quakerism and decides she's an antislavery activist. She left Charleston and she went to Philadelphia, where Sarah picks herself up and becomes a vessel for reform. And then she brings her younger sister, Angelina, who then goes on and the two of them go on to become firsts in terms of American women's history.

They publish some of the first and most biting, and critical, and powerful denunciations of slavery, urging that slavery is an institution that white women in particular should denounce, because it's not only immoral and against the Bible, but it also, the way that it deals with womanhood. So, that's who the Grimke sisters were, and I make a point to argue in the book that this is who they believed themselves to be and who they were, and this was their career and their offerings to the world. So, this became the story that the white Grimkes told about themselves, and then the Black Grimkes told. So, their brother, Henry, had three sons with an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston, and those boys were brought up before the Civil War, so under slavery in Charleston by their mother. The father, the brother of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, died in 1852, leaving the still enslaved Nancy with three boys all under the age of four.

And when he died, he basically left her in the city of Charleston to his family, and the family, who I argue in the book, know that she has these children by their family member. They basically put her in a house by herself and say fend for herself. She's not free, and she's living in Charleston. She raises her boys, as she says, to acknowledge that they have the best blood of the south running through their veins. So, she raises them to really consider themselves and think of themselves as being separate from the misery that surrounds them. And Charleston, in Antebellum Charleston was really the epicenter of low country slavery and the violence that it took to keep slavery as a system running. Charleston was one of cities, New Orleans was another one, in which the Black population was the majority. And so, as many historians have shown the way to keep a majority, or try to keep a majority subjugated is through intense acts of violence and control.

And so Charleston, as I started to read about it, became a city that was very, very regimented in terms of the Black population. So for instance, there were alarms that went off at nighttime to warn that Black people were not supposed to be on the street. And if they were on the street, then any white man who was around could go and either return them to their "owner", or send them to the jailhouse, which was a very notorious torture center in Charleston that both pro-slavery and anti-slavery people wrote about through the Civil War. And so, part of what I was interested, and am interested in, is what does it mean that this family emerges in Charleston, in one of the most violent examples of American slavery that exists? So, Charleston is a place where in the 1790s this town has a meeting because there's all these smells coming from the ocean, and they are the bodies of enslaved people that are thrown over because the value has not kept up with the trading posts that's in Charleston.

So, this is the type of society that the Grimke sisters grow up in, and it's the type of society that the Grimke sons, the Black Grimke sons grew up in. And so, part of what that does, or part of what I interpret that that does, is twofold. Number one, it made it very difficult for the white Grimke sisters to recognize Black people as human beings who might have a different way of protesting than they might have. And so, really being able to look beyond the enslaved as a cause and really look at enslaved people as human beings. And that's not to say that their anti-slavery activism didn't come from a place that was truly sincere, it means that that slave system has an effect on how you then interact in the society. And likewise, that slave society had an effect on the Black Grimke brothers, because it really imbued with them the sense that they were supposed to be working for "their people," and yet they stood apart from them, and that somehow Black people who didn't come from the same background as they came from were somehow less than.

And so, what do I mean by that? Francis Grimke, one of the sons, the middle sons, became a very, very famous Presbyterian minister. He was head of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., probably the most esteemed Black church of its time in the country. So you had senators, and Duke Ellington's family went there, for instance, a very, very wealthy black congregation. And as the minister of that congregation, he's involved in the NAACP, and he's doing coat drives, and he's a feminist, and he's fighting for women's rights to vote. And yet when you read the way he's talking about Black people in his community was often very similar to the way the white Grimke's are talking about enslaved people or free Black community like 50 years before.

And it was very fascinating. So, Sarah Grimke, an anti-slavery activist, often talk about why couldn't ... She was exhausted by Black women talking when she would go to these anti-slavery meetings, why couldn't they just listen to her? Even though many of them have been formerly enslaved, they've been doing this work, why can't they just listen? So, this is in her private letter. Similarly, Frances Grimke, her nephew, Black nephew, 60 years later he's trying to tell Black people in his congregation why some of them are being disowned from the congregation, and they're being disowned from the congregation because he says they're leaning out of the windows with their arms exposed. And therefore, they're giving a bad name to the race. And so, "Sorry, you've been going to this church for all these years, we have to let you go because it's not good for you to be in here." And his thing that he says in that letter to them and his speech to them is that, "Why can't you just listen? I'm telling you what to do, just do it."

And so, I found all these comparisons of how the legacies of enslavement is not just in ownership, and money, and all those things that we talk about, it's in the way you relate to people and communities, how you talk to somebody, this assumption that somebody is lesser than you, whether it's because you're a white person who enslaved people or whether it's because you were a Black person who had a certain position within the slave society, and I found that in all of them throughout the research for the book.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

And I want to talk particularly about respectability politics a little bit later, but there's this moral conversion that the Grimke sisters go through, and it really is inspired by the move to Philadelphia. And I think, well, I know what your book does, is reveal the previously under-acknowledged, or frankly unacknowledged role that Black institutions played in that abolitionism. And I'm hoping that you could talk a bit about that, as well as the way that the natural rights rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence played in the Black radical abolitionist tradition too.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yeah. So, one of the things that I was very fascinated about was that when the Grimke sisters moved to Philadelphia in the 1820s, they moved into a community that had a very long-standing, vibrant Black community, some free, some still enslaved, some people who had been in that area of Pennsylvania since the 1600s who had intermarried with various Lenape Native peoples. And so, you have a very, very rich, diverse, politically conscious Black community. And when I looked on the maps, the Grimke sisters live with one of their sisters who moves up there first. They live in her townhouse, which is a few blocks away from where the edge of the Black community is. And so, what I was fascinated was less how the letters that the Grimke sisters, when they reached out to Black women abolitionists like in the Forten family, which I'll get to in a minute, I was more interested in the fact of the things that they ignored in their letters and in their writings.

So for instance, Philadelphia, before the Civil War, suffered from various white attacks from the Black community in the 1830s and in the early 1840s. And the Grimke sisters are living right on the edge of where that happens. And so, this is covered widely in all these newspapers. And at the very time that they're writing these in their diaries, but also in their letters to each other and to family members, they never mentioned any of the violence that surrounds them. And so, it's more like the silences that were in there, and I found that strange, because particularly since the Grimke women were so astute at pointing out when there were injustices around them, so they were very, very astute at, for instance, when they go on a tour in Boston and when a group of women argue for the passage of a law in Massachusetts that will end slavery. And they talk about making their way into Boston and they see that there are Black people who were forced to sit in the back of a carriage.

So, they're constantly noting these things, and yet when they're in Philadelphia they never notice things that are these conflagrations of violence around them. And so, part of what I wanted to look at was what was their relationship then to the Black communities since the Black community in Philadelphia, one of the largest in the north at the time, it was the birthplace of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Black denomination. It's the center of James Forten, who is the leading wealthiest Black man in Pennsylvania, if not the north at the time. He ran a sail making business. It's a place where it has its own school system, you have all of these things happening, and yet the Grimke sisters don't react as if they're in a community that is already doing its own work. And for instance, when the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery society want to get involved in Black education, one of the things that happens is that the Grimke sisters and their group are involved in that, but they don't want to give to the Black schools that already exist, they want to create their own school.

And Black members of the community, led by Sarah and Margaretta Forten, who were James Forten's daughters, argue, "Look, we've been having these schools. It might be better for the community if you funnel the money through the community, because you're just going to be creating a school that already exists." And the amount of pushback that they get from the Grimke sisters, to Sarah Grimke's credit she does write to one of the Forten women and says, "I don't understand. Can you help me understand what it is that I'm missing?" And so, they have these moments where they're interacting on a different level, and yet it always just doesn't quite happen. And so, to answer your question in roundabout way, I think the Black community in Antebellum Philadelphia, like many Black communities in the Antebellum era that had a free Black population, had been abolitionists and radical abolitionists a long time.

And so, the tension was often between that community and what they saw as a lack of respect for the Black community that had been doing work in the community. And what do you do with that when you're both on the same page politically? So, it's not as if Sarah and Angelina Grimke are saying slavery is good, they're not. It's not as if the Black community is saying, "We don't want to work with you," that's not what they're saying. But what do you do when you have these real things that get in the way of you both collaborating on what you both sincerely want to see happen? And so, the Black community in Philadelphia had an amazing history of their own activism, they also had an amazing history of trying to partner with people like the Grimke sisters and Lucretia Mott, who was another white woman activist and members of the community.

And I was really interested in exploring why and when that was succeeded, and why and when that didn't actually end up being the thing that both sides wanted to see happen. And so, really asking the question, what happens when you're all allied? You all want to see this thing happen, and yet slavery itself is such a system that the way you interact with one another is hampered by the system under which you live. And so, it's very hard for Sarah and Angelina Grimke, for instance, to acknowledge that they might have had a role in what happens to some of the formerly enslaved people on their plantation.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

And that literally almost arrives at their doorstep in the example of their nephews. So, at Lincoln University, outside Philadelphia in Boston and in Washington, how did the Grimke sisters' nephews, Archie, and Frank, and John, who doesn't, until your book, really get talked about too much, redeem their once noble family name, especially in the eyes of the Grimke sisters, and how did their brothers feel about that?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yeah. So, the Grimke brothers, much like Nancy Weston, their mother who was enslaved, and the fascinating thing to me about Nancy Weston is she could neither read nor write, and yet she was adamant that her sons read the Bible every night. So, she didn't know how to read the Bible, she had a Bible and she made sure that they read it. And so, they learned how to read. And then she saved money by doing laundry for white people in the neighborhood to send them to one of the schools that was run by a white minister for enslaved Black children. So, by the end of the Civil War, the Grimke Brothers, the two oldest ones, Archie and Frank, endured horrendous abuse from their half-brother, named Montague, who comes back during the Civil War, and basically says, "I'm here to get my birthright, which is that my brothers, who are my property."

And so, there's scenes in the book where he's horribly abusive. He locks 11-year-old Frank in the hated Charleston jail where he is horribly abused, and the Civil War ends and the two brothers make their way back to Charleston in the city. And their mother immediately, in her mind her sons have the best blood of the South running through their veins, she wants them to succeed. She enrolls them in the local school that's opened by the Freedmen's Bureau. She's content that they're going to be able to go to school. And then, through that school she finds out that two of the white abolitionists who run the school offer to take the boys north to get a formal education. And so, Nancy sends them on their way, she's told that they're going to actually get to go to a real school and get good education. She gets word, however, that instead of going to school they're put in these apprenticeships where they live in a house in a farm, and they actually don't go to school.

And so, she very adamantly goes to the abolitionists and says, "I thought I told you I wanted my sons to go to school." And eventually they make their way to Lincoln University, which is the first Black university in Pennsylvania, they're going to school there. And their intelligence, and the fact that they were literally just enslaved and are excelling in their studies, catches the attention of the school principal who wrote a long article about them in the Anti-Slavery Standard. And when that story came out, the Grimke sisters, by then living in Massachusetts, read the story. The story goes that they tell themselves is that they were shocked and awed that these boys were related to them, they didn't know that their brother had had children with an enslaved woman. They immediately contact their brothers, and they agreed to pay for their education.

All of that is technically true, so they do pay for the education of the sons, but they pay for the education of, there's three boys, Francis, Archibald and John. Francis and Archibald, they pay for them both to attend Lincoln, after Lincoln University Archie wants to become a lawyer, they pay for it, part of his tuition to go to a Harvard Law School. Frank then graduates from Lincoln, he's not really sure what he wants to do. He's making his way in the world and then he decides he wants to go to Princeton, but he then cuts off the money strings from his aunts. He basically tells him he does not want them to pay for his education. And part of it, when I was looking through the record, well, why would he do that? He has no money, his aunts are basically giving him a free check to pay for this. Why would he do that?

And part of it was that he was very uneasy about the way they talked about his mother, number one, or didn't talk about his mother. And number two, the demands that they had for their nephews. And so, he always spoke very highly of the Grimke sisters and his aunts in public, he did these tributes to them in newspapers, but he pulls back personally. Archie, however, becomes very much immersed in Angelina Grimke and her husband, Theodore Weld's family. He lives with them for a time, they helped raise his daughter when she's born. He went on to Harvard Law School. And my argument in the book is that there's this dissonance between how the brothers feel about themselves being exceptional, which is banged in their head from the time they're very young.

"You will succeed, you're better than the enslaved environment in which you live. You're going to go on to Harvard and become great." So, they absorb that and they do become great. And yet, there's definitely a sense that not only that they're different from other Black people, but also that the horrible things that happen underneath slavery are not to be discussed, even though we know that they talk about them. So, one of your questions, I know you asked and I'm going ahead, but you said, "What is an aha moment that you had in the research?" And one of them was-

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Cross that off my list.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

One of them was, their papers are at the Moorland-Spingarn Library at Howard University, which is a fabulous collection but it's all over the place. You think it's one thing, you pick in and go out, it's another thing. So, I was in there and there's a deathbed basically, literally a deathbed writing by Angelina. As Archie is dying he says, "I want you to write about my life." And so, she's basically writing, he's dictating what his life is. And so, you can actually see in the paper the marks of her pen and where she's crossing things out, and then she gets another pen and she says, "No, no, no," literally, "No, no, no, he said this." So, it's like he's dictating on his deathbed his thing.

So, as a historian you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." And one of the things he begins with that narrative, so Archibald now he's been ambassador to the Dominican Republic, he's a Harvard Law School graduate, he's an investor in real estate, he's a one-time newspaper editor, he's had this fabulous life. He's always talked about his aunts as being these wonderful women, and the first thing he says, tells her to write down is, "Well, you know they were brutes." And underlines, underlines, underlines like four times. And so, it was like, "Hmm, what does that actually mean?" That this man, who's now, he's in his 70s, he's spent his life building up these and really believing these things about his family.

And he writes a whole tribute to his aunts anonymously in the crisis, it's all about the good works that the Grimke sisters done. And yet his first remark as he's dying is, "Well, they were brutes." And he goes in to talk about what it was actually like underneath slavery in Charleston, and the fact that they didn't have any food. The fact that his mother, the way she's treated by the Grimke women and the people in the town. And so, I think the Grimke brothers had a conflicted relationship with their past in the sense that they took it to be their birthright to succeed, and yet they also later on their life felt the after effects of growing up in a society that was so afflicted with violence, and terror, and uncertainty, and that then they meet their aunts.

And the aunts' reaction is basically that none of that really happened, that Henry Grimke, their brother, one of the things they say is that, "Oh, he was beloved by his Negroes," was the thing that they said. "Oh, it was so sad when he died in 1952. Everyone was really, really sad." And actually he would have freed Nancy and the boys, but the state of South Carolina had a law where he couldn't really free them. And actually, when you dig into the records, there were other white men who had children with Black women who actually did free, at the same time, their children, he chooses not to. There's evidence that right after Archie is born, so his first son with this enslaved woman, he basically rewrites his will in which he says that Nancy and any children she has belong to his white children. And so, he rewrites his will right after he has his first child, which speaks volumes about where their minds are in terms of their relationship with the Black community.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

You write about the elite classes on both sides of the color line, and this gets back to the respectability issue that the Grimkes spend more time, and we have time for probably one or two more questions before we turn it over to the audience, that the Grimke family generally is more interested in material attainment and racial respectability. And that's true for the white family as well as the Black family, than they are with actually dealing with this really brutal history. And in an alternative world, what would it have looked like if the entire family had focused more on learning from the past than on improving their material a lot in the present? And it also begs the question, what would it look like if we did something very similar?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

It's such an interesting question, and when you said that I was like, "Oh, this is an interesting question. I'll have to kind of sit with this one." What would it look like if they had handled it differently? I think just the way they talked about and treated each other, and were so not gentle with one another just in their private letters each other. So, an example of that is the Angelina Weld Grimke, who becomes the playwright, she's African-American, the daughter of Archibald. Archibald marries a white woman, and they have this daughter, Angelina. She grows up to become an amazingly prolific poet. I mean, the stuff that's published of her poetry now that you can get in an African-American literature course 101 is probably, I would say one-eighth of what she actually creates. She writes plays, and she writes novels, and she's experimenting with language, and she's talking about she reads T.S. Eliot.

And at one point she tries to take T.S. Eliot and write it backwards. I mean, she's amazing in terms of her mind, and nothing that woman did throughout her life was ever good enough. Her father and her uncle, she was always sinning. They were always concerned that there was something wrong with her. And they send her to all these very fancy private schools, and she's kicked out. Part of it is that she's having relationships with women from the time she's like 12 years old, and she can't do anything right. They send her to Carleton College, she has an affair of women there. They bring her back, they send her to what becomes Wellesley College. She's doing mediocre, but she's publishing in the local newspaper these fabulous poems that are playing with AB poetry forms, and she's like 13 years old and her family, all they can say is, "Well, you shouldn't be writing poetry."

And so, it's that type of not being gentle with one another. I don't think it's a sexy answer on how we get out this moment of how we account for our past, but acknowledging that the moment that they're coming from, which is a moment that's horrendous, and they're coming from a family that they have all these accomplishments but it's horrendous, and nobody can lean into the fact that this has happened. And so, the way they then treat and talk about each other is often as cruel as what the outside world is saying about them. And so, I think what it would look like is if being gentler and kinder to community, but also listening to the people in the community who are the least advantaged, and taking what they have to say to heart, what would it would've meant if the white Grimke sisters actually listened to the Grimke brothers when they meet them? And actually, what is it that you actually want? Type of thing.

Similarly, what would it have meant if the Grimke brothers actually listened instead of pontificating and talking to crowds of, "This is the way we're going to be in the NAACP"? What if they actually listened to the actual people they're talking to and gave a little bit of grace to acknowledge the moment they're in? It might've had a different outcome.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

One example that comes to mind right now as you're speaking, at one point the Grimke sisters admonished the Grimke brothers, their nephews, who had been enslaved and who the Grimke family had disallowed from learning to read and write, they admonished the nephews for their lackluster spelling and grammar in their letters, which is the height of irony, as Dr. Greenidge book points out. And with that said, conversion is such a profound part of this book. And how do you account for the myriad ways that this cast of characters do change? Or some of them do, truly. And then, what does that leave us with here in this now?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yeah, I think it's that people can be redeemed, and I think it's always possible, even if it doesn't happen in the way that you think at the moment, that it is possible to have a form of redemption. And that a brutal system like the slave system had a profound effect on people long after slavery ends. I know we have to get to questions, but one of the things that really brought home to me what type of slight glimpse of what slavery might be is the fact that Angelina Grimke Weld grows up in this huge house. She has 11 brothers and sisters, she's the youngest. She has slaves, she moves, she gets married, she has children, and she literally did not know how to care for her own infants. And so, at one point one of her children is basically starving, and Sarah, her sister, has to take the baby.

This is her son, Sody, who ends up having these mental health issues later on, and teach her how to feed it. And one of the things, I was asking friends of mine who are historians of slavery, and women, I was like, "What is wrong with her? Why isn't she able to do this?" And one Thavolia Glymph, who's a wonderful historian, was like, "Well, have you ever thought about how white women were taught to take care of their children if everybody's taking care of their children in that household?" So, you're not supposed to breastfeed your kid, you're not supposed to learn how to nurse a baby, that's not your role in that society. And so, what would it then mean if then Angelina makes her way to Philadelphia and she's living a life without enslaved people, and she has children of her own, and that's stressful enough.

She had horrible pregnancies, postpartum depression, probably now we'd define it as can't get out of bed, and she literally doesn't know how you breastfeed. And to me that was like, "This is what the slave system, what happens." And so, Sarah has to teach her. How did Sarah learn? Sarah's like, "I learned from the nursemaid." But they don't know how to handle their own children just by themselves, which is very abundantly clear. Their kids are running around, and it's overwhelming, because in one letter Sarah's like, "This is not Charleston where people did stuff. We're on our own." But if you've never learned that, how do you function? How do you actually deal with real things?

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Thank you. Audience questions, we have time for a couple. Yes, in the orange sweater there. Did your family go to Fifteenth Street Presbyterian?

Speaker 5:

No, but I know about Fifteenth Street Presbyterian, that's what my question is about. Can you talk about the Grimkes and their influence on education in Washington, D.C.?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yes. So, one of the phenomenal things that the Grimke brothers did was that when Frank became pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, he transformed that church really into not just the wealthiest Black church in the area, if not the country, but it had its own Sunday school, it had a whole literacy program. Angelina Grimke, who the playwright, becomes a teacher at Dunbar High School, which is the leading Black high school in the country for generations of Black leaders. And she's one of the teachers there who teaches English, and actually fought to keep the English curriculum in the Black public school, even though the city wanted to get rid of the English program and replace it with remedial education. And so, their contributions just in ... Oh my goodness. Uh-oh, it's the ghost of the Grimkes.

Speaker 6:

Are we not riveting enough?

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Yeah, we may have to stand up. There we go.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Oh, there we go. But I did a talk-

Speaker 6:

We're riveted.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Yeah. I did a talk in Charleston at one of the old churches there, and the lights went out and somebody was like, "It's the Grimkes. They're coming out." Anyway, but yeah, so the Grimkes have this phenomenal place in terms of Black leadership in Washington. D.C. Archie and Frank are founders of the NAACP. Angelina is one of the leaders and contributors to Margaret Sanger's birth control review, and writes for the birth control review throughout her life. So I mean, one of the things that still fascinates me above all of them is that their hand in all these causes, progressive causes from the 1830s all the way up, and yet there's this complicated family background that exists.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

The microphone is coming your way.

Speaker 7:

I'll probably learn this when I read the book, but have you talked with contemporary members of the Grimke family, and what kind of reactions have they had to your work and to the book?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Excellent question. So, Archibald and Frank, the African-American brothers, Frank did not have any children that survived, and Archie had Angelina of course, and she never had children of her own. So, as far as I know they don't have any descendants. Now, they have another brother named John, who's never really talked about, and part of that was because the Grimke sisters considered him a failure and stopped paying for his education. So, he had a very, very different life than his older brothers, and I found evidence that he might have had a child but I don't know if that's true, so I didn't put that in the book. It's in the footnotes there. But as far as I know, there aren't living descendants that I have found, that doesn't mean they don't exist. In terms of the white Grimke families, the one descendant who I contact and got back to me is a Grimke descendant who now lives in England, and he's done a lot of the genealogical work on all of the Grimkes, because they had 12 children, and then each of those children had like 5 children.

So it was like, I mean, hundreds of them all over, and he was really helpful and he liked the book. He came to one of my talks in Charleston, and he was one of the people who pointed out to me that descriptions of Charleston before the Civil Wars, like Grimke names all over the place, and then after the Civil War it disappears. I was like, "Well." He's like, "I don't know why that is." I was like, "Hey, I know why that is, and that's actually a good ..." I would've not missed it, but I really wasn't paying attention. And he's like, "Look," and he showed me the city archives and the records of the streets, and it's like Grimke, Grimke, Grimke, and Grimke Haberdashery.

And then 15 years later literally nothing, which is what's going on with that in terms of how they fell from grace, so to speak, in terms of the city.

Speaker 7:

Do you have any insight on that?

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

I think many things. So, the matriarch of the Grimke family, Mary Smith Grimke, her summation was that her sons were failures. A lot of them were alcoholics. Despite, again, being very esteemed, one of the Grimke sisters brothers became this author of the laws in Ohio, so he moved to Ohio and basically wrote that state's antebellum legal code. So very, very smart, but they struggled. They had alcoholism. Two of her youngest sons had children, none of those children, according to the Grimke sisters, amounted to much. And so, they put it on Archie, and Frank, and the Black children like, "You are the ones who are going to carry the name forward."

The other ones they're failures basically by the end of the Civil War. They allied themselves with Confederacy, a bunch of them invested money in the Confederacy, and then of course Confederacy loses, and so they lose a lot of the money. Some of them go on to become local servants in South Carolina, but nothing like their aunts or their Black male relatives. 

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

Dr. Greenidge, thank you so much. We are at time. Thank you for the gift of your time for being here, for your time-

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Oh, thank you for having me.

Dr. Andrew Davenport:

... Dr. Greenidge. I'm going to turn it over to Jane Kamensky now, thank you.

Dr. Kerri Greenidge:

Thank you.

Jane Kamensky:

Thank you both for this wonderful discussion, which among its many other virtues, shows the power of thinking with families, and how that family lens can open up not only how people make history, but how history makes people, and I love that, the impress of their times on them as well as their own change-making. I hope that Dr. Greenidge has left you really wanting more of this book, which happens to be for sale in the gift shop right across the way. She will be signing immediately after the talk. I also want to invite you all to take a quick survey of tonight's discussion and other things that you want to see here at Monticello. There's a QR code in the gift shop, and it will give you a discount on the book and on anything else you might purchase so that we can learn from you and what you're looking for here in the future. Thank you again, both so much. It was a really terrific conversation.