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Historian Kerri K. Greenidge’s The Grimkes was met with rave reviews when it was published in 2022. The book, which calls into question the virtue of prominent abolitionist sisters in the antebellum south, was called a “compelling” account of “slavery’s indelible stain on a white abolitionist legend.” Publisher’s Weekly even named it one of the ten best books of that year.
But now Greenidge’s publisher, Liveright Publishing, has pulled the book from shelves after several of Greenidge’s academic peers came forward with concerns that she had misled readers and failed to present sufficient evidence to back up some of her key claims in the book, which sought to rewrite the narrative around two sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who were born and raised in a slaveholding family but ultimately denounced their upbringing and branched out on their own as important figures in the abolitionist movement.
The Grimke sisters were the daughters of John Grimke, who had more than 300 slaves on his South Carolina properties. A New York Times book review from 2022 notes historians long believed the Grimke sisters “rejected their white inheritance by coming north and joining the movement, gaining moral credibility that few of their peers could match.” However, “Greenidge challenges this narrative, showing that the sisters’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery. The lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence and shame of white supremacy.”
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Mainstream media was all too eager to accept the rewritten narrative about two of America’s abolitionist and feminist heroes.
At the time of the book’s publishing, just one year after the death of George Floyd rewrote the way many of America’s institutions and leaders engaged with conversations about race, the Times heralded Greenidge’s book as providing “a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating, through an adept use of the family’s letters, diaries and other archival materials, how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition.”
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However, two years after the book was published, as the excitement around both the book and the country’s racial obsession began to wane, Myra C. Glenn, a retired professor of American history at Elmira College, raised concerns about inaccuracies in the once-celebrated story.
Glenn was examining Greenidge’s book on behalf of Reviews in American History, a scholarly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and found that the book on the Grimkes was “well-written” but “deeply flawed.”
“All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims,” Glenn wrote. “Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
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While Glenn’s critique was the most public facing, Tufts University, where Greenidge was employed at the time of the book’s publishing, had apparently quietly undertaken a review of the book in December 2022 in response to complaints that it contained “multiple errors of fact and failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another,” according to a statement from the university to the New York Times last week.
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The post Celebrated Historian’s Book Knocking White Abolitionists Received Rave Reviews. Now It’s Being Pulled From Shelves appeared first on American Renaissance.
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