Kerri K. Greenidge | |
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Occupation | historian |
Employer | Tufts University |
Awards | Mark Lynton History Prize |
Kerri K. Greenidge is an American historian and academic. Her book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a biography of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize. [1] Her sisters are the playwright Kirsten Greenidge [2] and the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge. [3]
Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, director of American Studies and co-director of the African American Trail Project at Tufts' Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. [4] [1]
Previously Greenidge worked as a historian for the Boston African American National Historic Site, under the auspices of which she wrote and published Boston Abolitionists, a short history of the role that Black leaders in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood played in the Abolitionist Movement in the pre–Civil War era.
Greenidge's research focuses on the role that African-American literature has played in the Civil Rights Movement and particularly its more radical expressions in Boston during the Progressive Era, as well as its intersection with populism in the Democratic Party. [4]
Greenidge signed 2020 A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, but asked later for her name to be removed from the letter, which was done. [5]
Greenidge's 2022 book The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in biography. [6] In a glowing review, the New York Times notes that Greenidge establishes "the sisters’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery." [7] Smithsonian (magazine) named the book one of the ten best history books of 2022, [8] and it was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History in the same year. [9]
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
Angelina Weld Grimké was an African-American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet.
Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the architects of the American abolitionist movement during its formative years from 1830 to 1844, playing a role as writer, editor, speaker, and organizer. He is best known for his co-authorship of the authoritative compendium American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published in 1839. Harriet Beecher Stowe partly based Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Weld's text; the latter is regarded as second only to the former in its influence on the antislavery movement. Weld remained dedicated to the abolitionist movement until slavery was ended by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Its members felt "unmanly" the policy of accommodation and conciliation, without voting rights, promoted by Booker T. Washington. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo. The Niagara Movement was the immediate predecessor of the NAACP.
William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter, was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The Liberator (1831–1865) was a weekly abolitionist newspaper, printed and published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison and, through 1839, by Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves ("immediatism"). It also promoted women's rights, an issue that split the American abolitionist movement. Despite its modest circulation of 3,000, it had prominent and influential readers, including all the abolitionist leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, Beriah Green, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Alfred Niger. It frequently printed or reprinted letters, reports, sermons, and news stories relating to American slavery, becoming a sort of community bulletin board for the new abolitionist movement that Garrison helped foster.
Sarah Moore Grimké was an American abolitionist, widely held to be the mother of the women's suffrage movement. Born and reared in South Carolina to a prominent and wealthy planter family, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1820s and became a Quaker, as did her younger sister Angelina. The sisters began to speak on the abolitionist lecture circuit, joining a tradition of women who had been speaking in public on political issues since colonial days, including Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Dickinson. They recounted their knowledge of slavery firsthand, urged abolition, and also became activists for women's rights.
Charlotte Louise Bridges Grimké was an African American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
The Grimké sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), were the first nationally-known white American female advocates of the abolition of slavery and women's rights. They were speakers, writers, and educators.
Sarah Parker Remond was an American lecturer, activist and abolitionist campaigner.
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was held in New York City on May 9–12, 1837, to discuss the American abolition movement. This gathering represented the first time that women from such a broad geographic area met with the common purpose of promoting the anti-slavery cause among women, and it also was likely the first major convention where women discussed women's rights. Some prominent women went on to be vocal members of the Women's Suffrage Movement, including Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, and Lydia Maria Child. After the first convention in 1837, there were also conventions in 1838 and 1839
Pennsylvania Hall, "one of the most commodious and splendid buildings in the city," was an abolitionist venue in Philadelphia, built in 1837–38. It was a "Temple of Free Discussion", where antislavery, women's rights, and other reform lecturers could be heard. Four days after it opened it was destroyed by arson, the work of an anti-abolitionist mob.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Until 1950, African Americans were a small but historically important minority in Boston, where the population was majority white. Since then, Boston's demographics have changed due to factors such as immigration, white flight, and gentrification. According to census information for 2010–2014, an estimated 180,657 people in Boston are Black/African American, either alone or in combination with another race. Despite being in the minority, and despite having faced housing, educational, and other discrimination, African Americans in Boston have made significant contributions in the arts, politics, and business since colonial times.
George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the Boston Guardian, an African-American newspaper in which he and William Monroe Trotter published editorials excoriating Booker T. Washington for his accommodationist approach to race relations. He also founded and edited the Boston Courant, one of Boston's earliest black newspapers, and edited the A. M. E. Church Review, a national publication.
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X is a biography of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne. The book was published in September 29, 2020 by Liveright in hardcover format while an audiobook, narrated by actor Dion Graham, was simultaneously released by Recorded Books. Among other honors, the book won the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Robert Thomas Teamoh was a newspaper reporter for The Boston Globe and state legislator in Massachusetts. He was the nephew of Virginia state senator George Teamoh.
A symbolic day in the history of the American abolitionist movement was May 14, 1838. On that date two related events occurred: the inauguration in Philadelphia of Pennsylvania Hall, built to symbolize and facilitate the abolitionist movement, and the wedding of Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimké, "the wedding that ignited Philadelphia." The wedding was held that day because of the many out-of-town abolitionists present for the inauguration of the Hall.