March 19 - The Grimkes

Kerri K. Greenidge and Harold Holzer

On Sunday, March 19, at 4 p.m., JHC welcomed Tufts professor Kerri K. Greenidge to discuss her critically acclaimed new book, “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” which was recently featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and named one of the Times’s “100 Notable Books” of 2022. The event was moderated by renowned Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer.

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Greenidge’s book–which was also named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Oprah Daily, Smithsonian, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Public Library–tells the story of Sarah and Agnes Grimke, “revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North.” Previous tellings of the story, however, “have long obscured their Black relatives.” Greenidge, by contrast, “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.”