Presented in partnership with Boston Public Library and GBH Forum Network

Moderated by Kellie Carter Jackson

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century—a stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke 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 are still read today; yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge reclaims the lost side of this famous family. This grand saga spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, revealing the short-comings and injustices perpetuated by the white Grimkes and exposing the limits of progressive white racial politics. Just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy of those myths.

Kerri K. Greenidge is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. She is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, winner of the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other honors.

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of the award-winning book Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and Historian-in-Residence at Boston’s Museum of African American History.