I got about 35% through this book. It barely focuses on Sarah or Angelina's childhood. The family members all have the same name so it was hard to follow. The book was very "academic" for my liking which is probably why I put it down.

This interesting book is a great piece of historical scholarship, especially because it reassesses "known" history to include information that's not easily known. Historian Greenidge writes about the Grimke family, starting with the lives of the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina. White Quaker abolitionists, these sisters usually get the historical spotlight, when their family--including biracial nephews--gets lost. Greenidge puts a spotlight on the entire family with a litany of historical information and anecdotes.

Sarah and Angelina's brother Henry fathered three biracial children with one of his biracial slaves. These children were Archibald, Frances, and John. Frances's wife Charlotte was a teacher and writer who was an abolitionist herself. Archibald's daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, was a Harlem Renaissance writer who was also most likely a lesbian. Within the stories of this extended family, various nuances of slavery are explored--how the Grimke sisters were compelled to abolish slavery due to their spirituality, yet still took money and lived off of their brother Henry, a slave owner. How Henry fathered three children with Nancy Wilson, his biracial slave, but still kept them all enslaved. A slave named Stephen who was treated abominably by the family and ended up physically disabled because of it. How Angelina Weld Grimke promoted "educated and cultured" Black people as superior to poor Blacks.

All of these nuances and the stories of the family members build a compelling picture of the layers of both interpersonal and political issues surrounding the institution of slavery. I really enjoyed learning more about this family and how their relationships helped push abolition--even incrementally--forward.

I have been on a nonfiction kick recently and this one stood out for many reasons. I loved the honesty and emotion. I felt like I was in the moment with the author and I felt like the articulation of the circumstances were easy to understand which I appreciated with such a complex issue.

I really love these histories that are not always what they seem. I teach a Women's History course in a high school in MI and I love having this additional knowledge under my belt when I teach. Great book.

A history of an American family follows both white and black relatives. I wanted to admire Sarah and Angelina, the white daughters of a Judge in South Carolina. Yes they were anti-slavery. But they were still racist. I wanted to admire Archie and Frank, the sons of Sarah and Angelina's brother Archibald, but they were not exactly nice to people who had darker skin. Frank, a prominent minister in DC and Archie, a Politian who was appointed consul to the Dominican Republic raised Archie's daughter Angelina "Nana". Nana was a teacher and prolific Black writer/producer.

I learned more history that they don't teach in public schools. And it is not a pretty picture.

3 1/2 Stars

ARC review copy via NetGalley

A richly detailed book on a family whose Black and white members contributed so much to this American history. How the lives of the family members--Black and white--are intertwined is fascinating.

I was excited to be able to read this book because the Grimke sisters are two of a very small handful of folks on the right side of history from my state of South Carolina in the 19th century. They moved to Pennsylvania and took up the cause there but their mom, Polly and brother Henry more than made up for their loss by being incredibly cruel to their slaves. At times I could not stomach another description. The story goes on with the Grimkes and their transformations. Sarah initially though the solution was colonization but after she and Angelina interacted with black families, their ideas changed from asking for Christian prayers for their oppressors to abolition. They fade from the story as other Grimkes are highlighted. All of this was new to me as I believed the sisters became abolitionists from the get go.
This highly documented story continues throughout the 19th century and such figures as Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others make their appearance. Women's rights get tangled in with black freedom and it's amazing any of this succeeded as factions didn't agree with each other on how to best pursue their goals.
The beginning of the book has a brief bio of the various persons of the Grimke family but I wish it was more like a family tree graphic. I would have found it easier to follow. I think there are 3 Angelina Grimkes.
Still, I herald this as a scholarly (but easily readable) approach to slavery and its dismissal through the eyes of the historical Grimke family. Not to be missed. Excellent book.

As the author establishes, there's definitely a narrative of the Grimke sisters in the popular imagination--Sue Monk Kidd wrote an entire novel designed to make white readers, particularly white women, comfortable. 'The Invention of Wings' in 2014 presented a romanticized and sanitized story that highlighted specific parts of Sarah Grimké's relationship with one of the enslaved people that she owned, Handful, a 'gift' given to her on her 11th birthday. While it is true that Sarah helped Handful learn how to read and was scared within an inch of her life by her father, warned never again to do something illegal, and Sarah found her ways around this away from her father's watchful eye, the novel is primarily a narrative that focuses on enabling white readers to picture themselves as the heroic, noble white saviour who became an abolitionist and went against her Southern plantation-owning family's roots.

Even though I have read a substantial amount about The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, some of the materials have been confusing, or not comprehensive enough. This book changes that. For those who don't know the story, the Grimke sisters were white women who owned enslaved people of African descent on a plantation in South Carolina. Resisting their manifest destiny, they left this life behind and became abolitionists in the North. However, as the cover copy of this book indicates, not much has been written about their Black relatives; their brother, Henry; and one of the enslaved people he owned, Nancy Weston, with whom he had children, in addition to his white wife, Selinah Sarah Simmons. Professor Kerri K. Greenridge, a professor at Tufts University, presents a comprehensive and detailed view of the Grimkes and their family.

There are not enough texts about people from white families who had Black "branches," as they referred to them, in many cases choosing not to associate for various reasons and not always obvious.

History is more complex than that. Both Sarah and Angelina Grimke, when they became aware of their nephews of African descent--a product of their white brother Henry's relationship with an enslaved woman that he owned--helped them through schooling, but they also, as the author establishes, tolerated the sadistic abuse that Henry inflicted on them.

On a related note, because so many of the Grimkes, both white and Black, are similarly named, the author usefully has included a guide at the front of the book that breaks down who each person is, and refers to them by distinguishing nicknames to disambiguate them.

The details of the Black Grimkes are lesser known, and the author has provided an illuminating account of their lives, very often overshadowed by their white abolitionist relations.

"The tragedy of the Grimke sisters' lives was the fact that they never acknowledged their complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against," as the author argues. Despite their role as abolitionists, the sisters still had an image in their minds of the kneeling and 'eternally grateful' slave.

One of the gaps in scholarship about white abolitionists, and in fictional narratives that depict white people in the South such as the Confederate Vampire is a discussion of why they opposed slavery (cf. Bill Compton, Jasper from Twilight, and Stefan & Damon Salvatore among others). We're always told that they are opposed to it and that they didn't really want to fight in the Civil War, and not for the Confederacy, but they did anyway. These narratives fundamentally fail to address the specific reasons or upbringing, reasons, or evidence that led to the change of heart in these white characters. 'The Grimkes' seeks to reconcile some of that by providing details of how the sisters Sarah and Angelina came to reject the views of their slaveholding family in South Carolina, and how they eventually converted from their branch of Christianity to becoming Quakers.

Of particular interest is the author's exploration of the Grimke sisters' lives in Philadelphia, particularly in the context of the summer of 1834, then going back to when Charleston was Charles Town in the late 1700s.

The book details how the sister's father, John Faucheraud Grimké, a Justice of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions and lawmaker, came from Huguenot stock who fled France in the 1600s after Protestants came under attack. His wife to-be, Mary Smith, known as "Polly," is a crucial figure in the history of transatlantic slavery. As Stephanie E. Rogers highlighted in her award-winning landmark text, 'They Were Her Property,' one of the largest gaps and bits of misinformation in the minds of people when they think of transatlantic slavery and how it operated is the assumption that only white men were enslavers and planters.

The reality is so, so much more harsh. Not only were white women and plantation mistresses some of the absolute cruellest, vilest, and harshest in their treatment of enslaved people who they owned, but also, because of situations like the Grimkes with the white and Black branches, there were all kinds of situations in which a mixed-race son of an enslaver, if born of a free woman of colour, would possibly inherit the plantation property after his father's death, including the enslaved people there.

Polly was a horrendous human being who enjoyed torturing the enslaved people on the plantation of her husband. It truly is a wonder that any of her children turned out to be nothing like their mother.

One of the other vital components of the book is the brutality and murders of enslaved people of African descent that Sarah and Angelina witnessed, which was one part of what shocked them into their eventual abolitionist views.

Also dealt with are the relationships that the sisters had, including Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina's eventual husband.

Although Henry acknowledged his mixed-race children through Nancy Weston, he never manumited them. The book does an excellent job chronicling the Black members of the Grimke family and the harsh contrasts to their lives versus their white kin.

Another important family in this narrative are the Fortens, of whom Charlotte Forten, an African-American woman and educator, would go on to marry Francis James Grimke, one of the nephews of Sarah and Angelina.

The relationships included in this text, the vital explorations of why this matters in a contemporary context, and most of all, the necessary due and highlighted lens of stories that have been suppressed over time all combine to make this an essential text for anyone looking to gain more insights into the entire Grimke family, and race relations in the United States in both the 1800s and 1900s.

Many aspects of this family are still not as widely known or explored as they should be, and this text is an impressive addition to the body of literature about them.