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Episode 2: The First Family of Abolition · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: I am an abolitionist, I glory in the name, Though now by slavery's minions hissed, And covered o'er with shame.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: It is a spell of light and power, The watchword of the free,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was the Duchess Anti-Slavery Singers, part of the Mid-Hudson Anti-Slavery History Project, performing Song of the Abolitionist.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sung to the familiar tune of Auld Lang Syne with lyrics written by Boston anti-slavery editor William Lloyd Garrison, the song appeared in Garrison's publication The Liberator,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: On December 31st, 1841, as white and black abolitionists were reshaping the movement to not just limit the spread of slavery, but end it everywhere.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Among those activists were two white women, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, members of a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: The sisters understood the trade in souls as a sin, but they resisted a full understanding of slavery's implications for black people, some of whom were their nephews and nieces.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: The story of the Grimke sisters was first told in 1967 by historian Gerda Lerner.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is a foundational volume of modern women's history coming out at a moment when progressive white women were making the turn from civil rights and anti-war activism to feminism.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Lerner's argument that the Grimke sisters instinctively understood that their own desire to liberate themselves from patriarchy was linked to black freedom made a powerful impact.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: But that wasn't the whole story.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: As my guest, historian Kerry Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, makes clear in her new book, The Grimkés, The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: A panoramic narrative that covers over a century of American history, the Grimkés tell a story about a family that was both white and black.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was a family that shaped American history before the Civil War and afterwards as the nation struggled to imagine and implement racial equality.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And as the white Grimkés faded in their influence, the black Grimkés stepped forward as leaders in politics, religion, and the arts.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're listening to Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm your host, Claire Potter, a professor of history at the New School for Social Research and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is Episode 2 of Why Now?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: The First Family of Abolition.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Carrie, welcome to the show.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for having me.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad to be here.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I just want to start by saying how much I enjoyed the book, and I want to ask you about why you chose this topic.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot out there on The Grim Case already, but you felt a new book was in order.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I really had been somebody who I did a lot of work in public history as a younger person.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the Grimke sisters were names that kept coming up when you're talking about abolitionist history in the United States.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was, they're kind of peripherally in my background through college and through graduate school.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that they were never talked about in conjunction with their very famous nephews.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: um Archibald Henry Grimke and Francis James Grimke um who were leaders of the African-American community in the postbellum era and even though kind of the sense was that historians knew they were related a lot of the stories didn't link the stories together of the of the two uh families um and I really wanted to explore what it meant for the Grimke brothers the black descendants to be Grimkes as well as the relationship between the very famous Grimke sisters
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, Angelina and Sarah Grimke were the subject of a book by Gerda Lerner, which is really one of the first big books in women's history.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And your book serves as a pretty big corrective to that first volume.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk a little bit about what you saw and what the interventions needed to be?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Gerda Lerner's book, first of all, I always want to preface this by saying Gerda Lerner was one of the people I read as a high school student and it was one of the books that brought me into history and really wanting to look at history through different lenses.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that I wanted to correct, not even correct, but sort of question about that narrative is what does it mean when we have this idea that white women abolitionists
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: um were somehow absolved of the racial and class dynamics of their time simply by being abolitionists right what did it mean that these white women who came from a family of slaveholders um you know left the south became anti-slavery activists and had these nephews it turns out who were um produced by their brother and an enslaved black woman
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what did that actually mean for them, right?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then what did it mean for their activism?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, what can that tell us about the dynamics of race and class within an interracial movement for justice, like the abolitionist movement, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is probably far more complex than
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and you're very politely saying a more complex view.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Angelina and Sarah were racists.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we might want to talk about what we mean by that term, but I think one of the things your book shows is that they knew things about their family that they were unwilling to confront, and they understood the violence that was happening to the people who were enslaved by their family, and they did very little about it.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: They really almost failed to make it part of their consciousness.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, indeed.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things I found in my research and going into the Grimke-Weld family papers at the University of Michigan, one of the things that surprised me was how blatant it was that the Grimke sisters were building their career in the 1830s and having all these questions, moral questions, political and philosophical questions about slavery and came on the side of anti-slavery and wrote these brilliant, beautifully written treatises on why slavery was wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: didn't allow them or they didn't look at their own lives or examine their own lives in relationship to their family's slaveholding.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, they had these very complicated views of black people who once they were free, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that black people as enslaved people and as subjects and as kind of this abstract notion of freedom were people that they wanted to free, right?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when you actually talked about actual black people,
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: The First Family of Abolition
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  SPEAKER_00: Reconciling that with their view of black people in general.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I really wanted to explore in the book what that then, what is the legacy of that, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: That you have people who by all intents and purposes are anti-slavery, right?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: They were anti-slavery.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're being pelted with rocks as they're protesting for women's rights and for an end to slavery in the 1830s.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And yet they continue to have these views of African American people as being subservient, as
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Ignoring kind of the very real realities of the legacies of slavery both in Philadelphia and in Charleston and really ignoring their own family even though they saw all this violence pretty horrendously close up as young women.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things that you make very clear, and I think the writing is so wonderful because you don't over-dramatize it, you just present the facts, is that their father and their brother were almost psychotically violent and seemed to enjoy doing violence to enslaved people over and above the kinds of punishment that were commonly used.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: to Discipline Black People.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And one character you talk about is a young man who was raised to be a house servant.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us a little bit about him and what their brother did to him.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the Grimke family were very, very prolific slaveholders, if you can use that term, even for the time period.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they were like in the top 1% of wealthy white Southerners who owned slaves at the top of the society in Charleston.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the people that they enslaved was a man named Stephen, who was employed in the Grimke household in Charleston from the time he was a little boy.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he was
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: The
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition
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  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2
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  SPEAKER_00: A man named Stephen, so much so that by the time Stephen was an adult, he suffered from fits, as they called them in the 19th century.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's speculation that these were seizures brought on by the damage to his skull and his head by Henry F. Grimke.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually in the 1830s, Stephen became, in the words of the slaveholders, unmanageable, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't get him to work.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so in the 1830s, the Grimke family was trying to figure out what to do with him.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Should they send him to another family?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Should he be, where should he go?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And actually the Grimke sisters at this point in the late 1830s when Stephen wasn't an adult by this point, they were asked by their sister Mary Grimke
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  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2
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  SPEAKER_00: The First Family
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: and see how it is they're talking about Stephen's injuries, right?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So they're talking about it as if this just suddenly happened, right?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know why Stephen is the way he is.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: But then if you go into the, you know, a 20, 25 year of letters, you get kind of this narrative that Stephen was the way he was because of the horrendous abuse he suffered at the hands of their brother that was everyone in the neighborhood in the household saw quite frequently occur.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I mean, you know, you read the accounts of what what happened to Stephen and the outcome of it.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's actually quite clear that he probably had something that today we would call CTE, a kind of endemic brain damage that affected the functioning of his body.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's that kind of violence.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And, and I think we want to emphasize for our readers that
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: The extreme violence that we see in parts of the book is really part of a continuum of violence, that the whole institution of slavery was violent and there were extremes and then there were lesser forms of violence, but it was all violent.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to introduce another character who is the object of a different kind of violence from Henry, which is
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Nancy Weston, who I think is one of the most interesting characters in the book.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell our listeners about Nancy?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Nancy Weston was enslaved to the Grimke's
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: She was the mother of Archibald Henry Grimke, Francis James Grimke, and John F. Grimke, who were the biracial sons of Henry F. Grimke.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Henry F. Grimke was a notoriously violent brother of the white Grimke sisters.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Nancy Weston, from what I've been able to parse out of her history, was born to another
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: The Weston Family
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: remained enslaved or in bondage or unfree in some way in Charleston.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so Nancy Weston, there's evidence that I uncovered that she was sold with her child before she went moved into the Grimke household.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what became of that child or the brother she was sold with, but she ended up in working in the Grimke household and very quickly was hired as a nurse by Henry Grimke for his own two children.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: and from there entered into a coercive sexual relationship with Henry F. Grimke.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the book, I was very careful how to term this relationship because Nancy herself, when she was asked by her sons, was always talking about the fact that they came from this
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: wonderful family of Westons, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And of Grimke.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: She was constantly telling them that they came from sort of Southern, good Southern blood and Southern royalty.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really wanted to respect that in terms of her as a character and as a person, how she viewed and managed to sort of talk about her experiences.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And yet there is a lot of evidence that that sexual relationship
• 16:25
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• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it of course would be very difficult to believe that Henry, who on the one hand is beating Stephen within an inch of his life, is also a kind lover to an African American woman.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you're describing a very practical relationship, which of course we are familiar with from the story of Thomas Jefferson that has been so well documented by Annette Gordon-Reed, and that was really quite common
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: But when looking at Nancy, she doesn't raise her children to be enslaved.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: She is looking at a future beyond slavery.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: And talk to us a little bit about how she raised those young men.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she raises her three boys, and every time I think about it, I think she had three young boys under the age of three within a three-year period.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: So her sons are roughly a year apart.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so she has these boys.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Henry F. Grimke died in 1852.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: He did not free Nancy or the boys.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: He basically said that they belonged to his white sons, so the young, black, enslaved boys' older half-brother.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Nancy Weston
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  SPEAKER_00: The First Family of Abolition
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  SPEAKER_00: where she had a lot of contact with her relatives who were the Free Westons.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: So these are the people who were freed by Plowden Weston and they were Nancy Weston's relatives.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so she lives in this house and she became a laundress.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So she did all this laundry for white people in the neighborhood and for the local hotels.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And she used whatever little money she could scrape together to get them educated in the one school and the one church.
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• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And not just that, but they came from these black Westons, she called them colored Westons, who were members of the free black community in Charleston, who were some of the leading craftspeople and property holders within that free black community.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so the boys really, until the Civil War, grew up knowing they were enslaved,
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: but really having this idea that their enslavement was different, right?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that eventually their lives would be different than they were.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so the most powerful thing I think about Nancy Weston is raising children to have that understanding, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: And to survive as a form of survival.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then the question of the book is, well, what does that then mean once slavery ends, right?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You've raised three very accomplished, intelligent young men
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: To believe that they are somehow different than, say, the average black person who was enslaved, what does that then do to how they look at themselves in the world?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I want to come back to that point because it's so important to the second half of the book, but it also matters during their period of enslavement as well, because during that moment when Nancy Weston's life is kind of in limbo and she's working as a laundress, and I think here you make such an important point about the different kinds of unfreedom that existed in Charleston for black people, but Nancy Weston
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: is basically abandoned by the family for a period of time and expected to support herself and take care of herself and these children.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then one of the sons sweeps back in and says, okay, I need those young men, and they're going to come and serve me now.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And don't forget, you are enslaved.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: What happens then?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the son of Henry Grimke, the white son, so the white half-brother of the Grimke brothers, returned from New York.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was a character, Montague Grimke, who had all of these plans to become sort of this noble southern man.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he went to New York for a while, he tried to become a druggist, he then tried to become a doctor, he gets married, the first wife dies, he had two children.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he finally returned to Charleston just as the Civil War was about to begin and Montague Grimke, Henry F. Grimke's son, became a rabid secessionist.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even Charleston is sort of the hotbed of the secessionist movement.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: He sort of falls into that line pretty deeply, even for the city.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when he returned to Charleston in the early 1860s,
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: He basically swooped into Nancy Weston's life and wanted to show his younger half-siblings that they were enslaved.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he demanded that Archibald Grimke and Frank Grimke serve him in his house.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Archibald Grimke, who was 12 years old,
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: 13 years old at the time, completely refuses, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's told that he has to serve this household and so he pretended to be dumb.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: He couldn't hear what they were saying and refused to work.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so Montague Grimke then unleashes this torrent of violence on the two Grimke brothers.
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  SPEAKER_00: At one point, Archibald Grimke, to escape the violence, dressed as a girl and hidden in his relatives' homes,
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: to hide from his half-brother.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Frank Grimke, who was a year younger than his older brother, so he's around 12, 11, was also forced into enslavement, but again managed to keep on running away and hiding.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, Montague Grimke put his youngest half-brother into the notorious Charleston Jail, which was a horrendously violent
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  SPEAKER_00: When we're looking at the Grimke family, the white Grimke family, really parceling out how much they accepted violence as a tool and how much black freedom really depended on the white family's needs, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Montague decides he needed
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: to Assert His Power as a Slaveholder and so then he re-enslaves quote-unquote Nancy and her sons and wants to sort of become this southern gentleman.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean it's really an astonishing story and meanwhile Angelina and Sarah are up north traveling in abolitionist circles giving speeches.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Angelina in particular becomes a very compelling speaker
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow they manage not to associate this violence with themselves and this kind of neglect with themselves.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you make a really important point that their abolitionist focus is in many ways on the effect of enslavement on white people.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain that conundrum for our listeners?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so one of the things I was I was very compelled by was the writings and speeches of the Grimke sisters.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what is it that they're actually saying?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I went through their speeches and went through all of their writings, one of the things I noticed was that their writings are anti-slavery.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they were both very much
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: convinced that caste prejudice, as they called it, was an evil.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And yet they had this idea that it was an evil more so because of the effect it had on white people and kind of white morality and American morality than they were about these effects that it had on black people and justice and human beings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Part of a recurring theme in this book is what white people know but can't acknowledge.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are race riots, you know, violence against black people that are occurring in Philadelphia under the noses of these white abolitionists, and they don't seem to be recording that this is happening.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do we account for this, Kerry?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think that it is the story of how America, particularly white America, can deal with racial injustices or social injustices if it doesn't directly affect them, which is that
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: really seeing those injustices as somehow divorced from the everyday.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Even if, as in the case of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, that injustice occurs right in your backyard.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the first chapter in the book is the 1834 Philadelphia riot, which basically was a moment when the white
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: The first population of Philadelphia turned on the black population and one of many riots in which they basically tore apart the black community over a period of about four days, burning down churches, stealing people from their houses and beating them up and killing them.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the Grimke sisters lived about three blocks from where the heart of that violence occurred.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And for two women who kept such intricate diaries, right, of their life and of Philadelphia and of, you know, what the air smelled like and, you know, what the streets looked like in the different neighborhoods, they never mentioned any of the riots, which I found kind of strange as a historian reading what was happening in the newspapers actually in their neighborhood.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so, to me, that just speaks to this dissonance that I think a lot of
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: White America
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: To admit that it is occurring in your backyard is to admit that you have somehow created the violence that's exploding around you, right?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was very fascinated by that aspect of the Grimke sisters, particularly since they were sexual record keepers, right?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: It would be different if they were people who never talked about the politics around them, but they were constantly
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I want to just underline for our listeners, Carrie, how much your familiarity with the nature of the sources affects your interpretation.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I very much admire that, that you know so deeply how meticulously they recorded the lives around them.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And yet there are these
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yawning gaps that we have to interpret.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the Grimké sisters are astonished when these two young men after the Civil War, Frank and Archie, show up on their doorstep and say, we're your nephews.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: How did they not know?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well that is the big conundrum and mystery, even for me, delving into the family and the dynamics of the family.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: By the Civil War, the Grimke sisters amazingly had kind of revised their view of their brother Henry.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: So they go through their life
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  SPEAKER_00: About 30 years later, the Grimke sisters have revised that and they're starting to tell people that they have a brother, Henry, who was a slaveholder, but that he was a kind master, right?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that he had enslaved people, but the slaves would miss him when he died.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that wasn't it a shame that he had passed away.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so in 1868, the Grimke sisters are reading a newspaper and they see a name.
• 31:35
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• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And from that moment, they agree that they will, or they say that they are going to support the boys through their education, right?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that they need to just put behind them everything that's happened to them, and that they are now being saved by the Grimke sisters.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the astonishing things to me, as I was looking at the sources, was looking at the relationship between Angelina Grimke, her husband Theodore Weld,
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: and Their Own Children
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: The oldest son, Charles Stuart Weld, attended Harvard, but during the Civil War became an abstainer from any kind of participation in the Civil War.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: They had another son named Theodore called Sody, who for all intents and purposes had severe mental health issues, we'll call them now.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they had a daughter.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: named Sissy, who they called Sissy, who was the girl in the family, was extremely smart, probably I would say, you know, more accomplished than her brothers, and yet she's the girl in the family.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: And for Angelina and Sarah Grimke, they were very concerned that these three children didn't live up to kind of this Grimke lore.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the time the Grimke brothers, the black Grimke brothers, come along,
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was definitely a notion, and Angelina says this in many letters, that these black Grimke's are going to be the savior of the Grimke name, right?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to bring glory to a name that has now been, you know, damaged by slavery and secession and the Civil War.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they're going to bring, in a way, glory to a name that has been damaged by the fact that you have three Grimke children who the parents believed didn't become remarkable kind of citizens of the world.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not even going to ask you how you avoided using the phrase white women's tears when Angelina Grimke was having her nervous breakdown over having black nephews.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: But these black nephews, the black Grimkés, are really there on the upswing.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an interesting moment in your book where the white Grimkés are really in decline.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: They sort of fade from public view.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: They become economically less powerful.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: They really just sort of fade as a group.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the black Grimkés
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: are on their way up, and tell us what happened specifically to Archie and Frank.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: John sort of moves out of the limelight, but Archie and Frank become very famous.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: How?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, so Archie, Archibald Henry Grimke and Frank Grimke, after they met their white aunts, the aunts did agree to pay for their education at Lincoln University at an all-black college in Pennsylvania.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, the two Grimke sisters
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: had all these debates about where the boys should go from there.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Archibald Grimke eventually went on to Harvard Law School.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Frank Grimke eventually went on to Princeton Theological Seminary where he got his degree.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the 1880s, both of them are considered rising stars in this group of kind of the developing black elite after the Civil War.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Archibald Grimke eventually moved to Boston, where he ran his own law firm.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: He becomes very involved in local politics, becomes a leader in the black political independence movement, and eventually was appointed head of the Massachusetts State Hospital for Mental Illness, and eventually was then appointed to become ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Frank Grimke eventually became pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., which was the most prestigious black church, if not the country, definitely in the region.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the 15th Street Presbyterian Church boasted black senators and congresspeople and artists and all the leading families of kind of this black elite.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so Frank was their pastor.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: and Sarah Grimke died.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Grimke name that most people in the North knew was the name of the Grimke brothers, right?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Grimke brothers, the Black brothers, Archibald was a very famous, you know, political actor, and Frank Grimke was very much known as this minister, as one magazine said, the pulse of Negro America, right?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's kind of like the voice, supposedly, of Black America.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the early 1900s the Grimke brothers Archibald Grimke helped found the NAACP He was the head of the NAACP in branch in Washington DC Frank Grimke helped steer Washington DC's community through the founding of various schools including the Dunbar High School and so they're really kind of on the on the up and up right whereas the white Grimkes
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: were in decline, just to say the least, after the Civil War.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they lost all their fortune given the end of the Civil War and the fact that most of their money was in slaves.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and let's just say it, they were awful people.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were awful people and with very few talents.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, with a few challenges, right?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this speaks to what we think of when we think of slaveholding culture.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And when I'm reading, I sort of owe a lot to people who studied the South and slaveholding in the American South in particular, is that it was not often conducive to raising younger people who became able to function once slavery ended, right?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's one of the things I want to kind of have as an undercard in the book,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those children ended up, you know, having sort of all these problems with their own families, running out of money and drinking themselves, right?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so what then is that legacy, right?
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: That you're raising this generation of white people to be white supremacist, violent people, and yet,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's no accomplishment there, right?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: By the time you get to the 1850s and 1860s.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the Black Grimke's have sort of all these accomplishments by the end of the century.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they're strivers.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they know they have to work hard.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: They know they have to be, as the phrase goes, best men and best women.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: in order to make their way in what is still a very racist country, a country that is given to white political violence against newly freed black people or not so newly freed black people.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: But their striving also has consequences for their worldview and for the politics they espouse.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so one of the things that was fascinating to me is reading all of Angelina and Sarah Grimke's writings and letters and then seeing how some of what they were saying reflected in the later writings of Archibald and Frank Grimke.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: So Archibald and Frank became leaders in this black elite, very accomplished men, very well-read men, yet they had these views of black people
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: that carried over from their childhood, I would argue, in Charleston, which is as a means of survival, Nancy Weston taught them that they were different, right?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: That their lives were not going to be enslaved for long, that they were destined for greatness.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a great way to instill in a person a way to strive and achieve.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: But then my question was, what kind of person in terms of civil rights and blackness does that person then become, right?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Particularly at this time period where the argument for many African Americans and white Americans as well, was that, you know, black people would get the rights they deserved if only they did such and such, right?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: So only they would, you know,
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things, for instance, Archibald when he became the consul, which we now call the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, he has no qualms about talking about the Dominican people,
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Completely oblivious to the fact that American companies were going in and founding these sugar estates and dispossessing and violently treating Dominican peasants.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he's seeing that around him, right?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he has no response, right?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: His response is that this position as consul or as ambassador is good for the race because it's a sign that he and therefore the race has arrived, right?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he really had no, you know, he had no, throughout his life, he had no sort of questioning of that.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: For somebody who was so committed to civil rights, as he would call them, he sort of saw no conflict.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, his brother, Frank Grimking, is the pastor of this church in DC, and for all, by all accounts, ran that church underneath what somebody called the thumb of respectability, right?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: Frank Grimke would say that he was merely uplifting the race, right?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was making sure that black people in D.C.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: sort of realized their worth.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so really with the book, I really tried to look at, well, how the consequences of that, number one, and number two, how kind of heartbreaking that is, that that is sort of where the Grimke brothers ended up by the early 20th century, is that they definitely became
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Two members of kind of this, by the Harlem Renaissance, younger Harlem people would call them kind of old guard Negro leaders, right?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Very much into respectability.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't talk about your past.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Lighter skinned people were better or more fortunate.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: You had to go to the best schools.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: You had to go to all these ideas of respectability.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and in a plot twist that is worthy of dynasty, Archie Grimke is so confident about his place in society that he falls in love with and marries a white woman.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: And Angelina Weld Grimke is born into these twin dynasties of white abolition and black superiority in freedom.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, really the hopes of the Grimke family are invested in her.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, before you tell our readers a little bit more about Angelina Weld Grimke, who becomes a very famous poet, you really bookend the entire volume with her story.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know, am I the only person alive who did not know she was a lover of women?
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think, well this was very fascinating to me is that I had, you know, going and doing, being very interested in black literature and reading her stuff and reading criticism surrounding her, literary critics.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: People had always mentioned that she had quote-unquote relationships with women, but there had been sort of, that wasn't as talked about kind of in the mainstream people who were teaching about Angelina Grimke.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think more recently, it's kind of come out that that's the case.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Many historians, when I was reading works, were hesitant to talk about this because they said, well, she had a relationship with a man or wanted a relationship with a man, and we don't know if she ever actually acted on these relationships.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that's fascinating to me is when I was going in the archive, seeing all of these letters and poems that she's writing to women, multiple women over multiple years,
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: Very intimate talking about their bodies and you know all these types of things and from a very early age and Angelina Weld Grimke not really seeing anything wrong with that until the reaction of her of her father and her aunt and uncle and then really becoming Somebody who realized that she had to sort of suppress that in a way.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: And she sort of refuses to be disciplined by other people, which I think is a very important theme of the book.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So tell our listeners a little bit more about Angelina Weld Grimke, who is really sort of the culmination of this book.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: She is the person who comes out of all of these relationships.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, so Angelina Weld Grimke, who is fascinating to me, if there's one thing I hope for this book is for somebody to open up all of the wealth of avenues you can take exploring these lives.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: So Angelina Weld Grimke was the daughter of Archibald Grimke, which means that she's the grandniece of the Grimke sisters.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: She was born in 1880.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Her father, Archibald Grimke, married, as you said before, Sarah Stanley, who was a white woman
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when Angelina Weld Grimke was about two years old, her white mother, Sarah Stanley, suddenly decided to go back to her family in Michigan.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the Sarah Stanley's family had disowned her for marrying Archibald, told her that they would never speak to her again.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: She suddenly decided, when her daughter was two years old, to move to Michigan.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and eventually ended up staying there for five years, raising Angelina Weld Grimke in this
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: The First Family
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: The First Family of Abolition
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Developmentally, right?
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And yet everything she did as a little girl was considered problematic or a threat to some idea of normalcy or propriety.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: By the time she was in high school, Archie goes to take his job in the Dominican Republic.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: She was sent to live with her Uncle Frank,
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: in Washington, DC.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's evidence that she was writing love letters and cavorting with a young black girl who remained a lifelong friend of hers, Mary Burrill.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so she was sent away to a school in Michigan, Carrollton, now Carrollton College.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: She goes there, she ends up having relationships with women there, ends up being kicked out or asked to leave.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: ends up then at various private schools in New England before she eventually enters the Boston School of Gymnastics, which is a predecessor to Wellesley College.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: So very, very well educated, but the kind of rumors surrounding her and ideas surrounding her is that she's somehow unruly, right?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of other people's take on her.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: My take on her was that she was somebody who loved women and was very repressed by the world in which she lived.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, didn't have a lot of interest in partaking of this kind of black society into which she was born.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, being very curious about where her family came from.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: And recognizing very early that the story she was told, which was very limited, she was kind of just told that her father and uncle had somehow survived slavery, life was good for them now, you know, and so just, you know, buckle up and behave type of thing.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Being very concerned from a very young age, well, what's actually the real story?
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody telling her.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: And meeting, for instance, Nancy Weston, who's her grandmother, who by this point is old and living in DC.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: And why was it that Nancy Weston couldn't read, right?
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Which would be a big question, right?
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: If she was born enslaved but came from this loving family, right?
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't she ever learn how to read, right?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody telling her why.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so Angelina Weld Grimke becomes a prolific, prolific writer and poet.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: She writes and publishes her first poems at 12.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's all kind of these little snippets of life.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: She talks a lot about her love for women and particular women, but she also talks about, you know, death and all of these things.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so she's very, very prolific in writing and becomes kind of a favorite within kind of literary circles and eventually got a job teaching school in Washington, D.C.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: and living with her father and her uncle.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I really wanted to bookend her as the Junkie family story because I really see her as kind of the promises and then failures of this class, right?
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: She's extremely talented, extremely bright, extremely prolific, and yet she herself had these views of blackness and her own blackness that were
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: A Political Junkie
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition Episode 2 The First Family of Abolition
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: So Carrie, why should our listeners read this book now?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the story offers a view, I think a lot of us right now in this political moment, social moment, cultural moment, are struggling with where we go, right?
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: Where is the world going?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, if you're somebody who was raised in kind of the post-civil rights, women's rights, gay rights era, and we're kind of in this different era that's not that, what are the possibilities of this era?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: Particularly since often we're told in 2022 that, you know,
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: All that needs to happen still is that you get a good job, you major in the right thing in college, you make some money, and life and all these horrible things will kind of be pushed to the back burner.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think, why was this story now?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think it speaks to our current moment in a very personal way, in that I think, particularly for a lot of black families who have so-called made it, right?
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have kids, you're not
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: The First Family of Abolition
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: is often less likely to be hired than a white person with no degree, right?
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean and what does success mean?
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then what does it mean, that success mean, in a context where we're telling ourselves certain stories about the past that weren't necessarily true, right?
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so in this moment, 2022, how can we reckon with that past that's been told to us or we've been understanding it kind of in a slightly different way than it actually happened?
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then how can that influence where we go from this particular moment?
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: In our families, right, in our relationships with people, in our relationships with communities, what kind of could a future, a different future than the Grimke's future look like?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it for today's show.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to the Political Junkie Substack at clairepotter.substack.com for show notes and to listen to new episodes.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: Leave a comment to let me know what you think, or ask a question.
• 56:11
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• 56:17
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• 56:25
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• 56:26
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• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: So please share with a friend and show Big Tech that we're popular.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: Why Now?
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers to Political Junkie.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Why Now?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Show notes, technical assistance, and research are by Emma Kern.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: My opening theme is by Galaxy News and my closing theme is by Avocado Junkie.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can find both of these terrific artists on soundstripe.com.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all for now.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.