Kerri K. Greenidge | The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Recorded November 11, 2022
In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition
Historian Kerri K. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a portrait of the post-Reconstruction civil rights activist. A New York Times Critics Top Books of 2019, it won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize. Greenidge is a professor at Tufts University, where she is co-director of the African American Trail Project and the interim director of the American Studies program. Formerly a teacher at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts, she has conducted historical research for PBS, the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford African American Studies Center. In her latest book, she offers a revealing counternarrative to the story of the famed abolitionist Grimke sisters that accounts for their long-ignored Black relatives.
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[@valeriemulholland4282]

Thank you for sharing this great talk. I’ve ordered the book.

[@parkerjohnson2368]

Awesome 👏🏾

[@truthtalker3498]

I agree that it's horrible the ways in which people turn a blind eye to intracommunity predation from sexually sadistic men. A more recent example--Kobe Bryant admitted to strangling a young woman without her consent and told police in his interview that "strangling" women during sex was his "thing." He had so normalized sadistic sex that he just assumed she would want to be strangled without even asking her, as he admitted later in his public statement. She actually was left with bruises on her neck. Yet, when he tragically died in 2020 and Gayle King mentioned this part of his history, she received rape and death threats from the black community and black women went on television claiming Kobe was a victim of a false accusation by a white woman and likened him to Emmett Till. So, I don't think it should be too hard to answer the question of why the Grimke sisters turned a blind eye to the predation happening in their own family. It's not a "white" thing. A certain type of woman in all races will defend “their” men at the expense of the victims. At least the Grimke sisters didn't go so far as to claim their brother was the victim, like Kobe's defenders did.

[@TroyBrownTV]

8:50 like Kim Kardashian and them. They parachuted in and attempted to install themselves as the leaders of a movement already in progress

[@TroyBrownTV]

15:36 what does that say about White people as a whole

[@truthtalker3498]

Nothing.