Charlotte L Forten Grimke

Charlotte Bridges Forten (Grimké) was born in Philadelphia, on 17 th August 1837. Her family were prominent people in Philadelphian society and were ardent abolitionists. It is said that they gave help to escaping slaves and were members of the anti-slavery group Philadelphia Vigilant Committee.
Charlotte attended Grammar school in Salem, Mass and was the only non-white student out of 200! She went on to teach at the Salem Normal School where she told her students that William Shakespeare, John Milton, Margaret Fuller and William Wordsworth were her favourite writers.
Not to be outdone by her male relatives Charlotte joined the Salem Anti-Slavery Society where she was active as fund raiser and as a speaker as well as an organiser of lectures at which she met some prominent thinkers of the time such as Ralph Emmerson and Charles Sumner,
Charlotte began publishing poetry after her return to Philadelphia in 1858 suffering from tuberculosis. Her early work appeared in “The Liberator” and “Anglo-African” magazines.
Much of our knowledge of her life and work stem from the fact that she was a regular diarist in early life and chronicler of the life of a free black woman in the days before the Civil War. Much of her writing has survived in one form or other. For example her essays “Life on the Sea Islands” was published in 1864 in the Atlantic Monthly and give insight to her work with former slaves.
In 1878 she married Francis Grimke, a minister, and in 1880 she had a daughter Theodora Cornelia. For a time they lived in Washington DC where Charlotte helped her husband in his work and established a women’s missionary group, continuing her efforts for “racial uplift”. On her work she stated that “Black Americans achieved success over extraordinary social odds, and simply wanted fair and respectful treatment.”
She died on July 23rd 1914

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