Two white abolitionists discover Black family members. Complexity ensues.
In 1868, Angelina Grimke read in an abolitionist newspaper about a “thrillingly, powerfully impressive” student named Archibald Grimke, enrolled at a Black college in Pennsylvania. That’s how Angelina and her sister Sarah, famous white abolitionists who’d forsaken their family’s South Carolina plantation decades earlier, came to learn that they had three Black nephews, the children of their late brother Henry and Nancy Weston, a woman he enslaved.
This moment arrives more than halfway through Kerri K. Greenidge’s gripping book “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family.” In its early chapters, the Tufts
