STONY THE ROAD WE TROD:
the Grimké Family's Journey from Slavery to Suffrage

Discover the legendary family - white and colored - who help lead the way out of slavery—And who fought for women's right to speak, learn, and vote

"I truly love this book...The abolitionist saga and the saga of women’s rights come alive in this very personal rendering of Angelina and Sarah’s lives…I loved how [the book has] woven together the human story and the history. It really is a remarkable book. "

Rosanna Gatens Renn, Retired Director of the Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education at Florida Atlantic University.

"The characterization is excellent, the tension appropriate, the historical story remarkable… the way [the author] shows the linked histories of abolitionism and women's rights profound and timely.”

Thomas Tryzna, Professor Emeritus, Seattle Pacific University, Author

VOLUME ONE

When young Angelina Grimke remonstrates with her brother Henry about his treatment of a household slave, she could not foresee how their legacies would intersect forty years later. Faced with the miseries of slavery on which their lives of privilege depend, Angelina and her sister, Sarah, leave their illustrious South Carolina family to become prominent abolitionists in the North. Because they are women, their highly effective public speaking is opposed by rowdy crowds, by the clergy, and even by their fellow abolitionists.

As Angelina’s passionate romance and marriage to abolitionist Theodore Weld unfolds, the sisters retreat from public speaking and must work out their own complicated personal relationship against the backdrop of their frustrated ambitions for public careers. Nevertheless, they continue to champion the cause of racial justice and women’s equality

Unknown to the sisters, their brother, Henry, is the father of three biracial nephews with his slave mistress, Nancy Weston. Henry’s death leaves Nancy and her sons vulnerable to re-enslavement by the boys’ white half-brother, Montague Grimke. Mistreated, abused, and beaten nearly to death, Archibald and Francis eventually escape. After emancipation they find their way north, seeking a full education and promising careers.

This fact-based epic spans three generations of the Grimke family (1826 to 1913). For Sarah and Angelina Grimke, “the rights of the slave and of woman blend like the colors of the rainbow....” and the struggle to achieve equal rights and dignity for each group defined their public and personal lives. While the sisters’ journey was often discouraging and difficult, the “stony road” trod by their bi-racial nephews, Archibald and Francis, was even more harrowing.

VOLUME TWO

At the end of the 1830s the abolitionists sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, along with Angelina’s new husband, Theodore Weld, take on the task of collecting first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery and publishing them in American Slavery as It Is. The success of the book helps to turn northern opinion against slavery. But the birth of three children and the challenges of their domestic lives means the sisters set aside their public roles as voices for human rights. Turning inward sets the sisters into painful conflict with each other.

Archibald and Francis Grimké, sons of Angelina and Sarah’s brother, Henry Grimké and his colored mistress, Nancy Weston, have barely survived the unspeakable hardships of slavery. Now young teens, they make their way to freedom in the North, but the promise of education proves elusive. Finally, their excellence as students at Lincoln University leads to their discovery by their abolitionist aunts.

By the 1870s the end of Reconstruction means a renewed struggle for African American freedom and rights. The romantic and domestic heartbreaks of Archie and Frank, and of Archie's daughter, Angelina, are intertwined with their lifelong struggle for the survival and equal rights of the colored community.