Grimké, Charlotte Forten, 1837-1914

Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten Grimké (August 17, 1837 – July 23, 1914) 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.

Her diaries written before the end of the Civil War have been published in numerous editions in the 20th century and are significant as a rare record of the life of a free black woman in the antebellum North.

Charlotte Forten Grimké was an abolitionist, writer, poet, teacher and prominent member of Philadelphia's elite black community. Active in abolitionist circles before the Civil War, Forten was the first black teacher to arrive on the Sea Islands of South Carolina after Federal troops occupied the islands in 1861.

She and others were recruited by Federal authorities to establish a system of public schools on the islands to educate the newly liberated black population. While there, Forten forged a deep friendship with Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry during the Sea Islands Campaign, and was present when the 54th stormed Fort Wagner on the night of July 18, 1863. She chronicled her time on the islands in her essays, "Life on the Sea Islands," which were published in Atlantic Monthly in the May and June issues of 1864.

After the war, Forten worked to recruit teachers for the U.S. Treasury Department and became a Treasury clerk in 1873. In December 1878, when Forten was 41, she married the Reverend Francis J. Grimké, a former slave and the minister of Washington's Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. She remained active in the civil rights movement until her death in 1914.

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Charlotte Forten Grimké, née Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten, (born August 17, 1837, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 23, 1914, Washington, D.C.), American abolitionist and educator best known for the five volumes of diaries she wrote in 1854–64 and 1885–92. They were published posthumously.

Forten was born into a prominent free black family in Philadelphia. Her father ran a successful sail-making business. Many members of her family were active in the abolitionist movement. Early in life, Forten was educated by tutors at home. Because Philadelphia’s school system was segregated, Forten’s father sent her at age 16 to secondary school in Salem, Massachusetts, which was then known for its progressive and tolerant spirit. While boarding with family friends there, she attended the Higginson Grammar School, where she was the only African American student in a student body of 200. It was in Salem that she first kept a diary. Wishing to be able to support herself, rather than turning to marriage as a solution, she matriculated at the Salem Normal School (now Salem State University), a teacher-training school, from which she graduated in 1856. She accepted a teaching position at the Epes Grammar School, an all-white institution in Salem. During that time she also began to write poetry. Some of her work was published in antislavery periodicals, including William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.

A fervent abolitionist, Forten intently followed news of the Civil War. In 1861, when Union forces gained control of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, the slave owners there abandoned their plantations and 10,000 slaves. Faced with that situation, the federal government launched an experimental program to educate the former slaves and sought volunteers to serve as teachers. In 1862 Forten traveled to St. Helena Island, where she worked as a teacher for two years. She wrote of her experiences there, and in 1864 her two-part essay “Life on the Sea Islands” was published in the May and June issues of Atlantic Monthly. While there she was thrilled to meet the renowned Harriet Tubman. Her recurring bouts of “lung fever” (pneumonia), exacerbated by the deaths of her dear friend Robert Gould Shaw and her father in the war, led her to leave her teaching position after her second year, but she maintained her interest in the fate of the freed slaves to the end of her life.

After returning to New England, Forten served as secretary of the Boston branch of the Freedmen’s Union Commission, recruiting and training teachers of freed slaves. Over the next few years, she also worked as a teacher at an all-black school and as a clerk in the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. In 1878, at age 41, Forten married the 28-year-old Francis (Frank) James Grimké, the son of plantation owner Henry Grimké and Nancy Weston, who worked on his plantation. The Grimkés were a prominent family. Forten Grimké’s brother-in-law Archibald became president of the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Frank’s aunts, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, were also influential in the abolitionist movement.