If you go
The following events are scheduled to honor Sarah Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld. All are open to the public unless noted:
Tuesday
10:30 a.m.: Unveiling of the Grimke historical marker at 321 East Bay St.
2 p.m.: Book signing with Sue Monk Kidd, College of Charleston Barnes and Noble, 160 Calhoun St.
6 p.m.: An Evening with Sue Monk Kidd (ticketed event, and tickets start at $40), Avery Research Center, 125 Bull St.
Walking tours
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be two-hour walking tours of historical sites connected to the Grimke sisters. Tours begin at 11:30 a.m. (or 12:30 p.m. Tuesday) and 3 p.m. The cost is $25, and the tours start and end in front of the Charleston Library Society, 164 King St. For more information, call 822-5248 or 478-8414 or visit grimkesisterstour.com.
Special exhibit
Between Monday and Saturday, the Charleston Library Society will display items related to the Grimke sisters from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (or until 2 p.m. Saturday).
Special luncheon
The Sophia Institute will hold a luncheon with Sue Monk Kidd at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Charleston Marriott, 170 Lockwood Blvd. For more, visit thesophiainstitute.org or call 720-8528.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke were born into privilege, daughters of an elite Lowcountry family during the peak of Charleston’s prosperity.
That’s why the story of their rebellion is so remarkable, and why it has been largely lost to history for so long.
They were some of the nation’s earliest voices against slavery, which made the prosperous plantation economy possible, and later for women’s rights, which would not become a reality for another century.
They not only pushed for abolition but for equal rights among the races. Along the way, they moved away from Charleston and were largely written out of their home state’s history.
That is changing this week, as area historians and novelist Sue Monk Kidd join forces for several events to celebrate the Grimke sisters’ life and legacy.
The collaborative event is backed by the Friends of the Library at the College of Charleston, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Sophia Institute, the Charleston Library Society and the Preservation Society of Charleston.
Harlan Greene, head of special collections at the college’s library, said the library recently acquired some Grimke family papers that had ended up in England. Meanwhile, Kidd’s latest work, “The Invention of Wings,” is based loosely on the life of Sarah Grimke and her childhood slave. That combination led Greene to think about highlighting the Grimke sisters’ story.
“It just struck me that since they are so unrecognized in the city of Charleston, why don’t we recognize them?” he said, adding this is part of the Friends’ new effort to recognize places of intellectual currency in the Lowcountry.
Sarah Grimke was born in 1792 in Charleston and served as a sort of second mother to her sister, Angelina, who was born 13 years later. Sarah left Charleston in 1829, and the sisters’ lives and beliefs slowly diverged from most of those, even other family members, in their native city. The two joined the American Antislavery Society in 1835, the same year a Charleston mob broke into a post office to destroy abolitionist literature.
The sisters’ subsequent writings and lectures, which drew on their own experiences in a slave-owning home, gave them national notoriety, and both Sarah and Angelina remained public figures until their deaths in 1873 and 1879, respectively.
The sisters’ lack of public recognition in their hometown meant that Kidd lived in the Charleston area for years but didn’t learn about the Grimke sisters until she visited Brooklyn in 2007 to see feminist artist Judy Chicago’s work, “The Dinner Party.”
Recognizing the sisters whose anti-slavery and feminist views broke so thoroughly from Charleston’s antebellum orthodoxy might have been difficult a decade or two ago, but in recent years, the city has erected monuments to noted slave rebel Denmark Vesey as well as to Robert Smalls, an enslaved ship’s pilot who stole a Confederate transport ship and handed it over to the Union during the Civil War.
“Women and blacks are now getting rewritten back into history,” Greene said, “and the Grimke sisters seem to combine them both.”
“One revolutionary thought sparked another,” Greene added. “They could first think outside the box to realize that blacks and white are equal, then take the next step to say women were the equal of men. They basically read the Bible as liberation theology.”
While the Grimke sisters have been recognized in other cities — Sarah’s words are carved in the new Boston courthouse, for instance —they have not been recognized much here.
That will change Tuesday, when Mayor Joe Riley, Kidd and others gather at 321 East Bay St., the sisters’ childhood home, to dedicate a new historical marker, just one of several public events planned.
Greene said the sisters slowly moved away from Charleston.
Sarah, the elder, left first to assist her ailing father in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Angelina eventually moved north, too, where their writings and thinking would mark a clean break from the mindset of their hometown.
The sisters’ abolitionism and feminism were rooted in their Quaker religion, said College of Charleston history professor Amy McCandless, “and it was this sense of divine mission that gave them the courage to criticize the patriarchal assumptions of antebellum American society.”
Not only did the sisters disappear from Charleston, but their Quaker church did as well. Its former cemetery off King Street is covered by a county parking garage.
Reach Robert Behre at 937-5771.
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