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

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.

On February 4, 2025, Dr. Kerri Greenidge discussed her book about the Grimke 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, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In "The Grimkes," award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue 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.

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, "The Grimkes" suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

This program was held as part of Black History Month at Monticello also part of the Leonard J. Sadosky Memorial Lecture series, an annual event that elevates scholarship through the late Leonard Sadosky. With Leonard's legacy in mind, his friends and family conceived the Sadosky Lecture, which brings an ascendant scholar to Monticello every year to deliver a lecture and engage with the intellectual community here.