Lift Up Thy Voice
The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite position as daughters of a prominent white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, for a life dedicated to abolitionism and advocacy of women's rights in the North. After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had had children with one of his slaves, the Grimké sisters helped to educate their nephews and gave them the means to start a new life in postbellum America. The nephews, Archibald and Francis, went on to become well-known African American activists in the burgeoning civil rights movement and the founding of the NAACP. Spanning 150 eventful years, this is an inspiring tale of a remarkable family that transformed itself and America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tracing the mid-19th-century life stories of two sisters and two brothers "four extraordinary individuals" Perry (Conceived in Liberty) guides the reader along the passage from slavery to emancipation to equality. The sisters are Sarah and Angelina Grimk , daughters of a white, wealthy South Carolina planter (and slaveholder). They were brazen enough to reject their state's, family's and class's pro-slavery traditions, becoming two of the most prominent and famous champions of abolition. The brothers in this story are their nephews, black men, Archibald and Francis Grimk , born in slavery and equally bold, eventually continuing their aunts' work into the 1930s and transforming the crusade against slavery into a battle for equal rights, thus establishing the foundation for the civil rights movement. From Sarah's birth in 1792 to Francis's death in 1937, Perry recounts their histories. A chronology, brief sketches of the major characters and a thorough bibliography supplement the text. The historical background is deftly handled; while clarifying policies (the Missouri Compromise, the "gag rule"), people (William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois), organizations (the American Anti-Slavery Society, the NAACP) and ideas (educational reform, spiritualism), Perry never loses sight of his primary subjects. The Grimk s' personal struggles (the sisters' search for religious fulfillment, the brothers' pursuit of political satisfaction) and their public and published works (Sarah's, as one of America's first feminists, and Francis's, as the first black leader to question Booker T. Washington's views) hold the center to make this book eminently readable.
