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The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
by Kerri K. Greenidge
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Nana Hamilton had not yet arrived as a doctor at Anna State Hospital when James was lynched, yet there is no doubt she read about it in the local newspapers as she traveled from her post at the state hospital branch in Lincoln to various "schools for the insane" across central and southern Illinois. "Mob Lynched Two at Cairo" shouted the headline of the Daily Review in nearby Decatur; "Lynch 2 at Cairo" boasted the daily Bloomington Pantagraph. 15 Even with these ubiquitous headlines and the notoriety that James's murder brought to the region, Nana Hamilton, granddaughter of two of the previous century's most famous white abolitionists and second cousin to leading members of the country's colored elite, neither signed her name to the anti-lynching petitions that blanketed Illinois in the aftermath of the lynching, nor did she publicly condemn the violence when she settled in Anna three years later. For Nana Hamilton, James's murder was not enough to keep her from calling the all-white town "a wholesome place" to move her father during the last years of his life. "Here is a good place for enjoying the twilight of life," she told her younger brother when he suggested that his larger home in Chicago might be a better place for the arthritic and mildly senile Reverend Hamilton. "I couldn't imagine having him in a more peaceful place." 16
But the legacies of this violence for southern Illinois' Black citizens and the consequences for their brethren across the country were devastating. James's lynching sealed Anna's reputation as a sundown town—a place whose acronym, "Ain't No N— Allowed," warned that the only Black people permitted within the town's limits were the handful of maids and cooks who worked there during the day. Once the sun went down, Anna's white residents bragged, any Black person unlucky enough to remain in the area was subject to violent attack. 17 But Nana Hamilton didn't seem to notice this, or if she did, she never said so. To her, Anna and the racially cleansed countryside that surrounded it would always be "a beautiful example of the American experiment"—an all-white town where she would become one of the most respected women physicians of her time. 18
Nana Hamilton had the privilege of skin color and class on her side as she chose not to acknowledge Anna's racial history; similarly, alienation from her Black relatives, along with an uncritical belief in the Grimke family's decency, allowed her to ignore the racial trauma inflicted by her maternal ancestors' slaveholding. For Nana Hamilton, being a Grimke descendant was an interesting fact and a personal badge of honor, but it was never a liability. She mentioned it in yearly alumni reports to the University of Michigan, from which she graduated in 1908; she let it slip that she descended from "a long line of selfless Christian reformers" as she served briefly as a homeopathic physician in rural Idaho. The Black poet-playwright Nana Grimke would never be so lucky. The Grimke family's history—the enslaved and the enslaver, the brutalized Black woman and the white people who inflicted the brutalization—haunted every decision, every family relationship, and every complex self-conscious understanding of Nana Grimke's place in the world. Yet she would never know the details of this family history beyond the myths she absorbed from the culture of racial respectability in which she was raised. Unlike Nana Hamilton, however, Nana Grimke could never ignore the legacies of this history, and so she used it as inspiration for a form of cathartic literature that reflected the unacknowledged rage and pain of the colored elite of which she and her family were such integral parts.
The legacy of American enslavement and racial violence within families—and how white and Black members of the same family, particularly women, experience this legacy—is the subject of this book. The Grimkes is the first collective biography ever written about the Grimke family that includes the famous white Grimke sisters (Sarah Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld); their Black nephews (Archibald, Francis, and John Grimke); Frank's wife, Charlotte Forten Grimke; and Archie's daughter, the Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke. The white Grimke sisters were famous in their own time, and they remain so to this day, viewed by most just as Nana Hamilton saw them: as antislavery and feminist heroes who left behind the comforts of plantation life in South Carolina for a harder, but moral, life of writing and activism in the North. The modern view of the Grimkes was shaped by Gerda Lerner's The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (originally published in 1967), which effectively absolved white Southern women of racial guilt because of their supposed economic and social subordination to slaveholding white men. 19 But, as scholars including Thavolia Glymph and Stephanie Jones-Rogers have recently shown, white women benefited from slaveholding as white people even as they struggled against patriarchal systems as women. 20 The Grimke sisters' antislavery activism was financed and supported by the labor and exploitation of Black women, even if the sisters protested "the peculiar institution" and cast slaveholding as a detriment to "Christian women of the South." This book builds on the latest scholarship to show how this gendered form of white privilege shaped both the Grimke sisters' relationship with Black people and, perhaps most significantly, white women reformers' relationship to the Black women who seeded the fertile ground out of which their activism grew.
Reprinted from The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge. Copyright © 2022 by Kerri K. Greenidge. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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