A "Pursuits of Knowledge" discussion with Kerri Greenidge, associate professor of History at Tufts University, from February 4th, 2025.
About the Presentation
In celebration of Black History Month, the "Pursuits of Knowledge" series featured a discussion with Kerri Greenidge about the Grimke family. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge 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.
A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.
This program was also part of the Leonard J. Sadosky Memorial Lecture series, an annual event that elevates scholarship through the late Leonard Sadosky. With Leonard's legacy in mind, his friends and family conceived the Sadosky Lecture, which brings an ascendant scholar to Monticello every year to deliver a lecture and engage with the intellectual community here.
About Kerri Greenidge
Dr. Kerri Greenidge is Associate Professor in History, and in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project and Tufts’ Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Greenidge's most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Award. The Grimkes was a finalist for the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award, a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Award from the Schomburg Library, and the recipient of the 2023 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. As a public historian, Greenidge serves on the historians’ council for 10 Million Names, and as historical advisor for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.