DC: Down the Grimke Rabbit Hole
A Civil Rights Legacy
I was out walking last week and noticed a plaque on a townhouse on R street not far from DuPont Circle.
It read, “Charlotte Forten Grimke House.”
The name Grimke caught my attention because of the famous sisters Sarah and Angelina, who were early and influential abolitionists and women’s rights activists.
But who was Charlotte?
Charlotte Forten Grimke was an anti-slavery activist, writer, poet and teacher, she was also African-American.
The Grimke sisters were, however, white.
There must be a story here, I thought, and indeed, there was.
Charlotte’s story spans a good part of the early civil rights universe in America and is filled with remarkable people.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke were born and raised in a wealthy slaveholding family in South Carolina before moving to Philadelphia, PA; they joined the Quaker community there.
Charlotte Forten Grimke was the granddaughter of James Forten, a black, wealthy and free-born Philadelphia titan who dedicated his life to “The Struggle.”
How did they wind up with the same last name?
In a story as old as slavery itself, one of the Grimke sisters found out that her deceased brother Henry had fathered three mixed-race sons with Nancy Weston, an enslaved black.
The Grimke sisters reached out to the three young men, Archibald, Francis and John, in what would have been a bold move. The sisters helped where they could, including with schooling for Archibald and Francis, who stayed in the North, while John returned south.
Charlotte Forten Grimke’s father was Robert Forten, son of James, and her mother was Mary Virginia Wood, the daughter of a wealthy and white North Carolina planter, James Cathcart Johnston.
Mary Virginia Wood was a slave and to complicate matters, was not the property of Johnston but rather of Captain James Wood, a tavern owner in Hertford, North Carolina.
Johnston never married but had a long term relationship with Mary Wood’s mother Edy, who was mixed-race. They had four daughters together and in 1832 Johnston emancipated them all and settled them in Philadelphia. He arranged it secretly through a Baltimore Quaker.
According to Martha M. Smith who wrote a biographical sketch of Johnston, “Freedom for slaves was not beyond his consideration. Several facts point to this interpretation: in 1841 he anonymously donated $250 to the American Colonization Society; in the 1850s he loaned $1,000 to a freed and widowed black and her five children for their resettlement in Ohio; and during the Civil War, he wrote that he preferred to give a pass to his slaves who wanted to go to freedom behind the Federal lines rather than to have them run away and make him appear to be a hard master, and themselves to be rascals.”
Johnston is an example of a slave-owner defying convention or stereotype for whatever reasons.
Mary Virginia Wood, now in Philadelphia, married Robert Forten and their daughter Charlotte was born in 1837.
Mary only lived to be 25 but achieved much in her short life. Mary Maillard writes, she was “a charter member of the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and of the Female Vigilance Association which raised money to feed, clothe, and shelter fugitive slaves in the members’ own homes.”
Charlotte Forten Grimke was also related to Robert Purvis; her father Robert Forten was Purvis’s brother-in-law. The Purvis family, like the Forten’s, were committed, wealthy abolitionists in Philadelphia.
Robert Purvis was born in South Carolina to a British Immigrant father, William and a free woman of color, Harriet. His maternal grandparents were Dido Badaraka, a former slave who was kidnapped from Morocco and sent to America on a slave ship and Baron Judah, an American of Jewish ancestry. Purvis married Harriet Davy Forten, daughter of James Forten, in 1832.
After the death of Mary Virginia Wood, Charlotte was raised by the Forten/Purvis families, including her aunt Annie Wood, who was only six years her senior. Annie lived with Joseph and Amy Cassey, well-to-do black Philadelphians who supported the early civil rights movement.
Joseph Casey died in 1848 and Amy married Charles Lenox Remond, an activist and abolitionist from Massachusetts. Charlotte moved with Amy and Annie to Salem where she attended the Higginson Grammar School and Salem Normal School. At Higginson, she was the only black in a class of 200.
Charlotte was trained as a teacher and during the Civil War and afterwards, she was part of the Port Royal Experiment where northerners went south to provide schooling for freedman and other blacks who were former slaves. She was based in Georgia on St. Helena, one of the sea islands.
She was a close friend of Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all black outfit; indeed, she was present in July 1863 when Shaw was killed during the storming of Fort Wagner.
In Washington, D.C., Charlotte helped to found both the Colored Women’s League and National Association of Colored Women. She worked alongside Mary Church Terrell, the civil rights and suffrage activist.
Both Grimke and Terrell taught at the famed M Street School in the District. Though public, it was more of a prep school and graduates were qualified for acceptance into ivy league colleges.
In 1878, she married Francis Grimke, one of the mixed-race nephews of the Grimke sisters. Francis was the pastor of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington.
He was also a civil rights leader, part of the Niagara Movement and he helped to found the NAACP.
Archibald Grimke, Francis’s brother, graduated from Harvard Law School and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898.
Both brothers were intimately involved in the civil rights movement working with W.E.B. Du Bois, William Trotter and others.
Charlotte Forten Grimke, her relatives and their associates represent the extraordinary breadth of the ongoing struggle for civil rights in America.
