“The rights of the slave and of woman blend like the colors of the rainbow...”
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld
Welcome
This website introduces readers to a remarkable American family whose work for civil rights and women's rights laid the groundwork for some of the advances of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their legacy is unfinished, but their stories show the impact of their public and private struggles on our history.
The new novel featured here, Stony the Road We Trod, is a work of historical fiction. However, it is a highly fact-based retelling of the family's stories. Most of the main events actually occurred and nearly all the characters are real people who knew the Grimkés. Because it spans three generations of this mixed-race family, it is told in two volumes. It is the author's hope that their imperfect but heroic lives will become a familiar part of the American saga.
Discover what the Grimkés thought and wrote:
“I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognize.”
Sarah Moore Grimké
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"I have heard black leaders....seek to gain the respect of white America through a shuffling acquiescence to race prejudice.…A race that permits itself to be trampled upon, a race that goes around with hat in hand, in a cringing attitude, is sure to be an object of contempt. Let us here, tonight, one and all of us, before God—in this sacred place, pledge ourselves to eternal hostility to any teaching that would put the negro in such an attitude."
Francis J. Grimké
“I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.”
Sarah Moore Grimké
“The Negro is the great American anomaly. Judge by his rights on paper his citizenship is indisputable, but judged by his rights in fact it is full of mutilations and amputations which disfigure it almost beyond recognition. One-half of it appears in the light clothed with fragments of his rights, and the other half is in eclipse, exposed naked to biting cold and bitter wrong.”
Archibald Henry Grimké