Charlotte L. Forten Grimké

Educator and activist

• Born: August 17, 1837
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: July 23, 1914
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Grimké was a prominent abolitionist, educator, and poet. One of a number of northern-born African Americans who devoted their lives to the uplift of their people after emancipation, she became the first black teacher to travel to the South to teach former slaves. She famously recorded her experiences in her diaries, which were later published.

Early Life

Charlotte Lottie Forten Grimké (GRIHM-kee) was born in Philadelphia on August 17, 1837, into a family of prominent abolitionists. Her father, Robert Bridges Forten, was an influential member of a network that provided assistance to escaped slaves. Her mother, Mary Virginia Woods Forten, died when Grimké was three. Her grandfather, James Forten, was one of her earliest influences. A successful businessman and dedicated abolitionist, he spent most of his life campaigning against slavery and repatriation to Africa. After her father remarried and had other children, Grimké had very little contact with him. She was instead raised by her paternal relatives, who were very active in the abolitionist movement. Her uncle, Robert Purvis, was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and, like her grandfather, a major financial benefactor of the prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others. The Purvis home also was a station on the Underground Railroad.

In 1853, after previously being educated at home, Grimké was sent to Salem, Massachusetts, to enroll as the only black student in the private Higginson School. There, she interacted with numerous activists involved in the abolitionist cause. It was during this time, in 1854, that Grimké began to write her journals. In addition to more mundane observances, she wrote of the racial injustices she experienced and witnessed in Massachusetts, including those resulting from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She also was a prolific writer of poetry. She developed a friendship with Garrison and dedicated her first published poem to him in his journal, The Liberator.

Upon Grimké’s graduation from the Higginson School in 1855, she enrolled in the Salem Normal School in preparation for becoming a teacher. Later that year, she joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society. After graduating in 1856, Grimké became a teacher at the Epes Grammar School in Salem and later at her alma mater, the Higginson School. She was the first African American to teach white students.

In August of 1862, Grimké returned to Philadelphia to care for ailing family members. While there, she received an entreaty from her friend John Greenleaf Whittier to travel to South Carolina to teach African American children who had been freed during the Civil War, which had begun the previous year. In accepting the assignment, which was part of the Port Royal Experiment, Grimké had the opportunity to combine her love of teaching with her desire to help her fellow African Americans.

Life’s Work

Grimké arrived in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on October 28, 1862. She was assigned to teach children on the island of St. Helena. Union Army troops had captured and occupied St. Helena and the other Sea Islands a year earlier; the white inhabitants had fled to the mainland, leaving behind more than eight thousand slaves. The Gullah people there had been isolated from American culture and thus retained much of their African linguistic and cultural heritage. For this reason, their education was considered by many in the North to be the ultimate test of the ability of the freed slaves to become assimilated into mainstream American society. Grimké knew that the success of the Port Royal Experiment would help pave the way for universal emancipation and saw her teaching role as an important contribution to this effort.

The people of the islands initially were skeptical of Grimké; most had never encountered a freeborn, educated African American. However, she eventually earned their trust and affection with her talent and skill at playing the piano. She found her students there to be passionate and eager to learn.

During her time teaching in South Carolina, from 1862 to 1864, Grimké chronicled her experiences in a series of letters and essays. Many of these essays were printed as “Life on the Sea Islands,” a lengthy account of her experiences written for The Atlantic Monthly in May and June, 1864, issues. The teachers had been encouraged to interact as much as possible with their students outside the classroom, and Grimké was able to record not only her own wartime experiences, but also those of the members of the community with whom she lived and worked.

In mid-1864, Grimké left South Carolina and began work in Boston for the Freedmen’s Union Commission. She then spent a year back in South Carolina teaching African American children at a school named for her friend Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment of United States Colored Troops. Grimké next settled in Washington, D.C., where she taught high school and worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. On December 19, 1878, she married the Reverend Francis James Grimké. Grimké was the son of a wealthy Charleston planter and an enslaved woman, and the nephew of the well-known abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Weld Grimké. A former slave himself, Francis had gained his freedom and graduated from Lincoln University and Princeton Theological Seminary. When he and Grimké married, he was the minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in the city. In 1880, Grimké gave birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter whom they named Theodora Cornelia. The infant died four months later.

Along with her husband, Grimké was very active in efforts to support equality for African Americans. The couple provided support for the founding of schools and colleges for black students and, in 1894, Grimké cofounded the Colored Women’s League. Grimké spent her final years in ill health, and on July 23, 1914, she died at home in Washington, D.C. The Charlotte Forten Grimké House in the city was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Significance

Grimké’s writing represents one of the few accounts of the life of a free African American woman in the antebellum North. She is best known for her journals, which were excerpted by The Atlantic Monthly in 1864 and were published in full for the first time in 1953. Her writings thus became a valuable primary resource on the lives of affluent, northern-born African Americans as well as slaves during the antebellum period and the Civil War. Moreover, Grimké used her eloquence as a poet to fuse her creative talent with her political activism. Many of her poems were published in abolitionist periodicals.

Bibliography

Burchard, Peter. Charlotte Forten: A Black Teacher in the Civil War. New York: Crown, 1995. Account of Grimké’s life from birth to death, with quotations provided from her diaries.

Grimké, Charlotte L. Forten. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. Edited by Brenda Stevenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Grimké’s journals are an important primary source for information on her life, her activism, and the society in which she lived.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Life on the Sea Islands.” In Two Black Teachers During the Civil War. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Provides Forten’s Atlantic Monthly piece in its entirety, with a detailed contextual discussion of the Port Royal Experiment.

Sherman, Joan R., ed. “Charlotte Forten Grimké.” In African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. A lengthy collection of poetry, with brief biographical introductions of each author.

Wilds, Mary. I Dare Not Fail: Notable African American Women Educators. Greensboro, N.C.: Avisson Press, 2004. Grimké is profiled in this biography for younger readers.