This program is funded in part by a grant from South Carolina Humanities and the ETV endowment of South Carolina ♪ upbeat classical music ♪ slower music I ask no favor for my sex.

I surrender not our claim to equality.

All I ask of our our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright, on that ground God designed us to occupy.

Many recognize the name Sarah and Angelina Grimké as fervent abolitionists.

Few however; note their definitive role in the struggle for woman's suffrage.

If you were going to tell the story of suffrage in South Carolina or of women's suffrage anywhere in the United States, you'd start with the Grimké sisters.

They were the first women to say in print the idea that women should have an equal political existence alongside men.

This is before the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Convention, which many scholars looked to as the beginning of the woman's rights movement.

These two women are radical in the fact that the people saw it as something for black women and also for themselves.

They were certainly the first to connect abolitionism and feminism.

No one else did that as soon as they did.

♪ The Grimké Sisters are the first known South Carolina related women to publicly and passionately embrace women's suffrage.

Their story begins in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sarah, the elder of the two was born in 1792.

Angelina, more than 12 years younger, was born in 1805.

Despite the age difference, the bond between the sisters was extremely close.

Indeed Angelina often called Sarah, mother.

Sarah was very-a motherly personality.

She was very warm and sympathetic, kind.

She loved children.

Although, we don't have any documentation we can be sure that she was attentive and loving to Angelina in a way that, it's pretty clear, their own mother was not.

Their father, John Faucheraud Grimké was a descendant of the Huguenots, a member of Charleston's upper class and a veteran of the Revolutionary War.

A colonel in the Continental Army, Grimké was taken prisoner by the British during the siege of Charleston.

He fought in several decisive battles, including Utah Springs and Yorktown.

Following the war he served as Mayor of Charleston, was a member of the State House of Representatives and became Chief Justice of the South Carolina Superior Court.

While, they came from very elite background, their mother had came from a family that went back to the colonial era.

In fact, one of her ancestors was Governor of South Carolina.

They were slave owners that had plantations as well as a town home and there were fourteen children.

The family first lived on Church Street in what is now known as the Heyward- Washington House.

Sarah lived in this house from the time she was two years old till she was eleven for nine years.

Now, Sarah's bedroom in this house, would be upstairs on the third floor and she looked out on the backside as you can see, there is the garden and the kitchen house.

And when Sarah was about five or six years old, she sees one of the slaves in their house being punished in the back yard.

It upsets her so much she runs out the front door right there, runs down the dirt path and they find her in the wharf begging the ship's captain, "Take me away," "Take me away, take me away" Every time she saw someone enslaved being punished it would upset her so greatly that she would lock herself up in her bedroom and get down on your knees and pray that God would stop the beating.

As the family expanded, they needed more room.

In 1803 they moved to 321 East Bay Street, formerly called Front Street.

It was here that Angelina was born in 1805.

The residents afforded a prime view of Gadsden's Wharf on the Cooper River, where slaves ships docked.

They had 17 people enslaved in their household who waited on them hand and foot.

Charleston was a very thriving city, enormous amounts of wealth, especially at the end of the 18th century.

And it was a port, it was a major port.

So it was a very exciting and interesting place to grow up in theoretically, but they lived a very sequestered life because of their upper class status and their privilege.

Their family as substantial slave owners had a plantation and they had a townhome and so there were enslaved people both on the plantation and in the townhome.

The Grimké plantation known as the "Grange or the “Quarter ” Plantation, was located in the upstate near Unionville.

The sisters visits there were infrequent.

Close by however; was the Country Estate called Belmont, where the family would spend their summers to escape the sweltering Charleston heat.

Belmont was located high on a hill in Union County, very near the Union- Spartanburg County line.

And then when they came up to the Spartanburg area, they came up to one of their homes- that was called the Belmont Farm.

It's just outside of Cross Anchor.

Right outside of Spartanburg County.

And the farm is still there- the home is all gone.

But the farm, the view, and they raised vegetables and had some slaves there and had a plantation down the road.

Judge John Grimké purchased this property and about 1790.

They did purchase more property 3 miles down the road.

And that was I think around 160-ish acres.

They called it Grange Plantation- it was an actual plantation but there was no house there.

He grew cotton there.

And so they had, I think it was 33 slaves, and the overseers stayed on that property.

They never lived on that property.

They visited the property, they went on picnics to that property occasionally, It was here at Belmont that the Judge felt most at home.

He would be the one that would take the children out to their plantation, and Mary did not go, if she did she probably would've blown a gasket.

Judge would take the kids out there.

One day he allowed Sarah to be out in the fields picking cotton with those enslaved.

Another day she's shucking the beans and helping to cook the evening supper.

Another time she's cutting out the burlap material called negro cloth to make their clothes.

What Judge Grimké is thinking is, "Someday she's going to marry a planter and she needs to know how to run her plantation."

But for Sarah it is an eye opening experience.

She's like, "Oh my gosh, we don't feed, clothe, shelter these people properly.

We don't pay for their services."

So, for her it's just one more thing that builds on that hatred of slavery.

The daughters really didn't have much experience on the plantation.

They 're familiarity with slavery was at home and in the schools of Charleston.

In which was enough.

Angelina commented that her hatred of slavery was dated to her early education in Charleston when she saw this young enslaved boy who was working in the school, covered with whip-marks and encrusted scars of where he had been beaten.

Steeped in the traditions of the south, Mary Grimké was reputed to be the epitome of a cruel slave mistress.

She would walk around the house with a short little whip and if someone rolled their eyes, didn't pick up the crumb- whatever their offense is, she would whip them right then and there.

She would have these whips strategically placed around the room.

She was very distant and aloof with her own children - the kids would describe it as when they got a kiss from their mom was out of mother duty instead of motherly love.

Sarah will describe one of their slaves named Maria took to running away.

And Mrs. Grimké had her whipped so many times that Sarah, she cannot even put her finger through the wet marks on her back.

This does not stop Maria from running away So Mrs Grimké decides that she will knock out her right front tooth.

Because when a slave runs away we have slave catchers during this time.

What would happen is they would place ads in the newspaper and they would try to put a defining feature of that person that had run.

There was nothing defining about Maria, so that's why Mrs. Grimké decides she will knock out her tooth.

That still does not stop Maria from running away, so she puts her in this collar.

It's made out of wrought iron as you see the poles are sticking up.

And the purpose of this collar is that if someone runs it will hopefully slow them down so the person can catch them.

Worse punishments were often inflicted at the nearby workhouse, sometimes called the Sugarhouse.

So the workhouse is where you sent your slave to be punished if you didn't want to do it yourself.

and that building that used to punish those people enslaved was an old sugar grinding mill.

And for 25 cents you could send your slave here and they would be punished.

They would have a whipping room and the room would have sand on the floors, the walls were hollow, and they would pour sand down those walls so that they would help to muffle the screams.

What scared those enslaved more than anything else was the two wheels that were put in after Denmark Vesey's almost revolt.

There is seven to eight people standing on the wheel.

They are holding onto a bar, there's a little bell at the end of the bar that rings every three to four minutes, tells that person on the end to jump off, the next person to jump on, and everybody else would scoot down.

They are required to do this eight hours a day.

Now, as you can imagine, this building isn't air conditioned so it is hot, it is sweaty, and it is very, very easy for someone to lose their grip on that and once they start to fall it's very hard to stop this wheel because it is a big piece of machinery.

I mean if you look at the new jail, that's what the work house looked like.

It's massive, it's intimidating, everybody knew what was happening in this building, anything to be able to keep that person down So, from an early age, they were exposed to slavery, but they questioned what it meant.

Sarah for instance taught her young enslaved maid to read.

I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little handmaid at When she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing out my locks, the light was out, the key hold screened, and flat on our stomachs before the fire, with a spelling book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina.

When Sarah was growing up, she was very frustrated because she wasn't interested in the things that girls were supposed to be interested in.

And not allowed to be interested in the things that boys were supposed to be interested in.

She was very envious of one of her brothers who people expected was going to become a lawyer.

The law really appealed to her, her father was a judge, She heard it discussed a lot, and somehow she thought that's exactly the way her mind worked, and that's what she would have liked to be.

But when she suggested she take Latin lessons, with her brother, father deferred.

He said this wasn't a thing for ladies.

Even though he recognized her ability, he said that- she just, she was a woman- she couldn't do the sort of things that her brother could do.

In fact he said at one point that if she was a man, Sarah would have been the best jurist in the country.

Brought up in the Episcopal church, a devout Sarah sought guidance through her faith.

Believing that religion should take a more active role in improving the lives of the suffering, she converted to Presbyterianism after a religious experience in 1817.

But in 1821, after spending time in Philadelphia, Sarah became a Quaker Sarah Grimké was never quite happy with the Charleston social scene.

She didn't like to participate in the kind of activities that were expected of an elite Belle.

And her father sensed that something was wrong- and when he became ill and the Charleston doctors simply could not diagnose his illness, he asked Sarah to accompany him to Philadelphia.

And unfortunately, the doctors there were not able to diagnose his illness either, and he died in the Philadelphia area.

Sarah remained in Philadelphia several months following her father's death, absorbing the reform efforts of the day, before returning to Charleston.

Well, she came back to Charleston but she had been exposed to a wonderful group of people who cared dearly about political and social issues.

And she kept thinking about that.

And eventually she asked if she could leave Charleston and go to Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia she joins the Society of Friends at the 4th and Arch Street Meeting House.

Her goal is to become a Quaker minister.

When she becomes part of the Quaker religion, they have 2 types of services.

The normal service where you have a minister and an elder talk to you, but they also have a silent service.

During that silent service, you just sit there.

And if God comes and speaks to you then you stand up and and talk.

It would take Sarah 6 and a half years before she would get up and speak in that service.

She wanted to make sure that everything was perfect.

It took her 6 years to find the courage, as we would say, to do it because she didn't feel confident that God approved of her speaking.

Yet she thought he was commanding her to speak.

So, she was tied in knots continually or some years after that, and she rose to her feet infrequently.

Back home in Charleston the independent minded Angelina also had begun questioning her way of life.

She too sought answers through her faith.

She joined the Presbyterian church at age 21 but was expelled when the ministers rebuked her for both her independent attitude and her insistent challenge that they refute slavery.

Visiting Sarah in Philadelphia in 1828, she soon professed her admiration for the Quakers.

Their evolutionary thinking had a lot to do with the fact that they left Charleston and went up to Philadelphia for a while.

And there they encountered Quakers and people of different thoughts.

They also encountered the free black communities.

So they are seeing people move in a different way.

So when they go up to Philadelphia they actually start to think about what does this mean for us as women.

And they go back to Charleston and it doesn't work for them and they decide to go back to the north and just leave the slave-holding south.

And then when they were in Philadelphia together, their relationship was off and on.

I mean, there were some times when Angelina was very frustrated with Sarah and vice versa, but they always were very loyal to each other.

It wasn't until the last couple of years of their life in Philadelphia that they started to come together on the same page of what to do about slavery.

that they embraced immediate abolition together, and that's when they, you know, agreed to head further north to New York and be trained as lecturers for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

♪ The sisters quickly ran afoul of the Quakers.

as they embraced abolition and engaged in anti slavery activities without seeking permission.

They also recognized contradictions between the Quaker doctrine and their practices.

But they were taken by what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Quaker meeting, that they had a colored bench.

And if you were going to talk about the equality of all souls, then why was there a separate bench for the colored members of the society.

And so they sat on the colored benches.

I mean it's really when you read about what they were doing in the early 19th century, it is amazing how coming from such a very conservative and restrictive background that they were radicalized so quickly.

So, their faith to them, seemed to be a requirement that you, bring truth to the world, and that's a message in the Bible.

And to them the truth that they cared most about was the truth about the experience of enslavement and how wrong it was.

But there were other things that their faith gave them, too, and one was the idea that you should obey God, not man.

That's the very radical idea, because the moment you say, "I don't care what other people think."

I only care what God tells me to do," then you are going on your own track, and society is less able to restrain you.

The other factor in their radicalism, the times were becoming radical.

That's really important.

Sarah and Angelina were more radical in the fact that they were more inclusive of their arguments.

Later that year, after violence erupted at a local public lecture by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina wrote a letter to Garrison In it, she stated her abhorrence of slavery from the viewpoint of a southerner.

Her views on abolitionism and mob violence and an entreaty that Garrison never forsake the sacred cause.

Activism did not come without a cost.

The ground upon which you stand is holy ground.

Never, never surrender it.

If you surrender it the hope of the slave is extinguished and the chains of his servitude will be strengthened a hundred fold.

But remember, you must be willing to suffer the loss of all things, willing to be the scorn and reproach of professor and profane.

You must obey our great masters injunction.

They're not them that killed the body and after that have nothing more that they can do.

He saw immediately that he had something really incredible there.

People who were able to give a really authentic representation of what slavery was like.

People who were repentant slave holders themselves.

This so inspired Garrison, that he published the letter in his newspaper, The Liberator.

Other abolitionists like Wendell Phillips also took heart.

We were but a handful then.

And our words beat against the strong public as powerless as if against the North wind.

At this time a young girl came from the proud estate and the slaveholding section.

She came to lay on the altar of this despised cause, this seemingly hopeless crusade, both family and friends, the best social position, a high place in the church, genius in many gifts.

No man at this day can know the gratitude we felt for this help from such an unexpected source.

When Garrison started publishing The Liberator and promoting the idea of the immediate abolition of slavery as a moral argument, that was completely radical.

It terrified a lot of slave owners and a lot of their sympathizers in the North.

It was in the air.

It was in Philadelphia and so the sisters were in the right place at the right time.

They knew people.

They had an African American friend, Grace Douglas, who attended their Quaker meeting and was a founding board member of the Philadelphia Female Anti- Slavery Society.

They were in this milieu and that was an important aspect of the radicalism as well.

The impact was instantaneous.

Controversy erupted within the orthodox Quaker community, which openly condemned such wanton activism, especially by a woman.

Sarah asked her sister to withdraw the letter.

But Angelina refused.

In 1836, she followed up by writing an appeal to the Christian Women of the South urging southern women to help end slavery by petitioning their state legislatures and their churches.

I appeal to you my friends.

As mothers, are you willing to enslave your children.

You start back with horror and indignation at such a question.

But why, if slavery is no wrong to those upon whom it is imposed.

Angelina decided to write the very first long essay.

It was very long, a pamphlet, as an appeal to the Christian women of the south because she understood I think that if anyone was going to persuade southern slave owning women to give up their slaves, it was going to be someone like her, who was a southern slave owning woman.

I know you do not make the laws but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do.

As soon as Angelina's anti slavery position began to be public, which was immediately after she wrote to Garrison and he published her letter.

Then from then on, she was notorious in the South and her book, The appeal to the Christian Women of the South, definitely would not have reached very many of those Christian women in the South because like all other anti-slavery literature, it probably would have been stopped at the post office, if not destroyed by a mob.

At home in South Carolina, Angelina's name was reviled.

The mayor of Charleston warned to Mary Grimké that should her daughter attempt to visit the city, she would be arrested and imprisoned.

Sarah at first was embarrassed by Angelina's outing so to speak, but then she realized she came to the conclusion that this was God's will and she would accompany her sister.

When the sisters went to New York in the Fall of 36' to be trained and traveling lecturers, agents, they were called by the American anti- slavery society.

They were trained with about 50 or 60 men.

No women were present except them.

And one of their trainers was a very experienced agent, very experienced traveling lecturer named Theodore Weld.

Theodore Weld, on the fourth day, gave a two hour lecture about how to think about slavery in terms of the arguments the opponents would be making.

And Angelina was blown away.

And Angelina later wrote that she fell in love with him at that moment.

They were the first female representatives of the American Anti Slavery Society.

And they started out doing lectures in New York then moved to Massachusetts.

They were the two main venues of where they spoke, New York and Massachusetts in various little towns.

When the Grimkés first began speaking against slavery the idea was to be sure to avoid controversy as much as possible by keeping their events solely exclusively female and in private homes.

But such was their uniqueness and ability to tell the story that people wanted to hear them and more than women.

The word began to spread.

Men begin to kind of slip in the back door of the parlor and finally the Grimké sisters said it's all right with us.

We believe that everyone needs to hear this.

And eventually they even moved to public venues, which was quite extraordinary for the time, women didn't speak in public venues, nor did they speak in church.

Sarah read the Bible as proving that God believed in women's equality and for her, she was very biblically grounded.

That was really important.

So, Sarah took her deep knowledge of the Bible and Angelina took her logical, enlightened mind and those things together produced a belief in women's equality combined with the fact they've both experienced plenty of patriarchal oppression in their lives.

But they had just accepted it as some of the way things were until they found ideas that allow them to think, "Wait" "a minute that doesn't make sense."

Let's say you go back to Massachusetts in the 1830s.

Now they are really interested in bringing their cause across the state of Massachusetts.

And so now this is where they're addressing different churches and doing up to three lectures a day.

They are beating the drum of the suffrage and anti-slavery cause and they see this as one unit.

And so they're not alone in this.

But they are rare because they are two Southern women doing this work.

23 weeks, 66 different cities, 88 different meetings.

By the time they were done, they had talked to over 41 thousand people.

Not everybody at these lectures is there to support them.

And one, this gentleman raises his hand.

He said, "Hey, I used to live in the South.

Slavery's not so bad.

You almost could see the steam come out of Angelina's ears.

And she really goes after him.

She says, Oh sir.

And she says wait!

I'm sorry I'm getting off tangent.

Why don't you and I finish our debate tomorrow.

She challenges them to a public debate.

They will debate for two days after that.

And by the time she's done with him, he is running out of that building.

And that was the first time a woman has ever publicly debated a man.

Check one, two women on that one.

But the officials of the American Anti-slavery Society we're the ones who were very upset that men were coming in, because they knew what the public reaction was going to be.

The anti-slavery movement itself was new, extra- ordinarily controversial.

There are male speakers even when they went around the country, attracted violent mobs constantly, pelting them with things, chasing them, trying to, beating them up.

And they knew that if you injected this whole new issue of women stepping outside their role, that it was going to cause a lot more trouble and it became ultimately an extremely important problem.

Not all those shocked by what the Grimkés were doing were Southerners.

In fact, many of Northern reformers were also shocked.

Catharine Beecher criticized the sisters' sponsorship of anti- slavery petitions.

Catharine Beecher was a very active reformer.

But she wrote to the Grimké's petitions to Congress fell entirely without the spear of female duty.

Men are the proper persons to make appeals to the rulers whom they appoint.

Catharine Beecher was Harriet Beecher Stowe's older sister who was sort of the arch priestess of domesticity.

In a way she was ahead of her time in that she defended the validity of single women's lives and claimed teaching as a respectable profession for women.

And that was out there at that time.

She wrote books about how to be a good mother and wife and to keep house and elevated that to the highest possible ideal for female behavior.

And not only that, but what was in her view, the only real ideal for women was to be a wife and mother.

What was bothersome to Angelina was that she took that to this extreme.

She'd believed that God created men and women to be different and for different roles.

And they were complementary roles and that people like Angelina were kind of messing that all up.

And so she publicly criticized Angelina.

And Angelina responded in the series of letters to Catharine Beecher.

When the president of the Boston female Anti- slavery society called upon women abolitionists to withdraw from public work, Sarah responded with letters on the province of woman addressed to Mary S. Parker, a strongly worded defense of women's right and duty to engage in public work on equal footing with men.

The page of history teams with women's wrongs.

And it is wet with women's tears.

For the sake of my degraded sex everywhere, and for the sake of my brethren who suffered just in proportion as they place women lower on the scale of creation than men.

I entreat my sisters to arise in all the dignity of immortal beings and plant themselves side by side on the platform of human rights with men to whom they were designed to be companions, equals and helpers in every good word and work.

In July 1837, the Reverend Nehemiah Adams of Boston wrote, a pastoral letter of the General Association of Massachusetts to the congregational churches under their care, attacking the presence of women generally and abolitionist movement and that of the Grimké's in particular.

The letter deplored quote "The mistaken conduct of those" "who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and" "ostentatious part in measures of reform" "and countenance any of that sex who so far" "forget themselves as to itinerate in the character" "of public lecturers and teachers."

Once again the sisters immediately responded addressing not just the issues of race but the issues of gender as well.

"All history attests that man has" "subjected woman to his will, used her terror as" "a means to promote his selfish gratification, to" "minister to his sensual pleasures.

To be" "instrumental in promoting his comfort but never has" "he desired to elevate her to that rank she was" "created to fill.

He has done all that he" "could to debase and enslave her mind."

"And now he looks triumphantly on the" "ruin he has wrought and says the being he has thus" "deeply injured is his inferior."

The letters were designed to put the foot down on the sisters but it completely had the opposite effect.

All of a sudden people are like Who are these ladies?

And more and more people came to see the sisters.

And Sarah of course wrote letters on the Equality of the Sexes that Summer, which was a clarion call to women's equality.

And the first coherent set of arguments for women's rights ever published in English, and probably the world, in any language.

♪ "There are few things which present greater" "obstacles to the improvement and elevation" "of woman.

To her appropriate spheres of" "usefulness and duty then the laws, which have been" "enacted to destroy her independence and crush her" "individuality.

Laws which although they were framed" "for her government, she has had no voice in" "establishing and which rob her of some of her" "essential rights.

Woman has no political existence."

And Angelina wrote chapters about women's equality in other parts of her published writings.

So and they both said the same things.

So they obviously had been having lots of conversations.

And they said what ever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right for a women to do.

"I recognize no rights but human rights."

"I know nothing of men's rights or women's rights."

In February 1838 Angelina was invited to Boston to speak before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature.

It would be the first time a woman addressed the legislative body in this country.

Lydia Maria Child who was present at the scene, later described it thusly.

"The house was full to" "overflowing.

For a moment, her sense of the" "responsibility resting on her, seemed almost" "to overwhelm her.

She trembled and grew pale."

"but this passed quickly, and she went on to speak" "gloriously, showing an utter forgetfulness of" "herself her own earnest faith in every word she" "uttered.

Whatever comes from the" "heart goes to the heart.

I believe she made a very" "powerful impression on the audience."

♪ "I stand before you as a southerner exiled from" "the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and" "the piteous cry of the slave.

I stand before you as a" "repentant slave holder.

I stand before you as a" "moral being endowed with precious and inalienable" "rights which are correlative with solemn" "duties and high responsibilities.

And as a" "moral being, I feel that I owe it to" "the suffering slave and to the deluded master" "to my country and the world to do all that I" "can to overturn a system of complicated crimes" "built upon the broken hearts and prostrate" "bodies of my countrymen in chains and cemented by" "the blood and sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds."

The only part that survives is the beginning of the first set of remarks.

And in it she tackles the question of how can a woman address a legislative body.

And so that was another moment when she asserted the right of women to be political.

And she did an acting politically, which is part of her genius.

And in those remarks she said, "I believe a woman has as much as right as a man to sit in the presidential chair of the United States."

Now there can be no bolder way to claim the right for women to be political than that.

I believe it is a woman's right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in church or state, and that the present arrangements of society on these points are a violation of human rights.

A rank usurpation of power of violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacred and inalienably hers.

And thus inflicting upon woman outrageous wrongs, working mischief incalculable in the social circle, and in its influence on the world producing only evil.

And that continually.

Fearing a backlash against the anti slavery cause as the women's issue gained traction Theodore Weld wrote to Angelina saying she should confine herself to talking solely about abolition.

Angelina wrote back Theodore Weld and can you not see that women could do and would do a hundred times more for the slave, if she were not fettered.

If we surrender the right to speak to the public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year.

And the right to write the year after etcetera.

What then can women do for the slave when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence.

Distressed by the divisiveness her campaign engendered, Angelina believed in her heart, she was right.

She had come too far to be concerned with near propriety when the question of humanity was at stake.

Theodore and Angelina had continued their correspondence.

In February 1838, they confessed their love for each other through letters.

To watch that romance bloom and to see these two earnest people idealistic reformers, devoutly religious Angelina and Theodore struggling with their feelings toward each other and whether or not if they were to fall in love and marry would they be able to keep up their role as reformers.

It's just so human.

And I just got to like them so much and to pull for them.

Ultimately, the two decided to wed.

This is a copy of their wedding invitation.

As you can see it's written in Theodore's handwriting.

Angelina signs it below.

As you notice, we have a slave in shackles on the top of it.

This would have been the wedding of the century.

On May 14th, 1838, Angelina Emily Grimké becomes Mrs Theodore Dwight Weld,.

When Angelina and Theodore were married their marriage was a interracial affair in which there was one black minister, one white minister and guests were both white and black, in addition to the fact that all the most notorious anti-slavery leaders from throughout the country were all there.

It was quite an event.

The wedding took place in Philadelphia at the home of the Grimké's recently widowed sister Anna Grimké Frost.

They said their vows just to each other, rather than having the minister marry them.

And in their vows which were extemporaneous, written out, they declared their beliefs in gender equality and Theodore renounced all of his claims to her money.

And given the fact that she was living off of substantial inheritance from her father throughout her whole adult life, he was some that was no small sacrifice.

Two nights after the big wedding, the women abolitionists are speaking at this building, it's called Pennsylvania Hall, it's downtown Philadelphia.

What's interesting about this is abolitionists were not welcome in the city of brotherly love.

They had tried to rent space and everybody said no we don't have a space for you.

So they had to build this building themselves.

The men spoke that night.

The women were the next night and Angelina is the keynote speaker.

When they arrived at the building, there's a small crowd gathered around it.

But the mayor says don't worry, I've got your back.

In the middle of Angelina's lecture, the mob gets out of control.

They start taking bricks and brasses and crashing in those windows.

And Angelina says I'm saying something right.

I'm making them mad out there.

What is a mob?

What will the breaking of every window be.

What would the leveling of this hall be.

Any evidence that we are wrong or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution?

What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our person?

Would this be anything compared with what the slaves endured?

No.

And we do not remember them as bound with them, if we shriveled in the time of peril or feeling willing to sacrifice ourselves need be for their sake.

By the time they're done, the place is completely surrounded.

The ladies look at each other and say what are we going to do?

So they lock arms, open the door, and hope for the best.

Amazingly enough, that crowd parts that way.

The next night, the building isn't so lucky.

They burn it down.

That building was three days old.

Shortly after the burning of Philadelphia Hall, the Welds and Sarah retreat to a farm in Belleville, New Jersey.

There in 1839, the threesome dedicated their time to producing a massive compendium, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.

They begin to focus their efforts on a book, which turned out to be super important because they did tremendous amounts of research over six months clipping out articles from many, many newspapers from around the South and documenting slave escapes and ads to have them returned and bills of sale and ads for slave auctions and all of these things.

They put together basically a primary source that could be used by all anti-slavery people.

And it ultimately was used by Harriet Beecher Stowe's to learn what she knew about the south and about slavery.

And it was the basis for her representation of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which of course proved to be extraordinarily important in building up sentiment against slavery throughout the North.

As they settled into domesticity, the Welds along with Sarah retired from public activity.

In short order, Angelina soon had three children.

Charles Stewart, 1839 Theodore Grimké 1841 and Sarah Grimké Weld 1844.

She also suffered two miscarriages which weakened her.

Sarah became her sister's caregiver and the doting aunt to whom the children looked for both affection and support.

Thus abandoning life on the speaker circuit the family sought to establish a certain normality in their life.

Subsequently, Theodore established two schools where he and the sisters taught.

The first was in Belleville, New Jersey.

The latter, Eagleswood was in the Raritan Bay Union, Utopian community in Massachusetts.

Here, they welcomed students of all races and sexes.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry had a close personal relationship with the Grimké-Weld family.

In an 1842 letter, Sarah Grimké counseled Elizabeth.

Henry greatly needs a humble holy companion and thou needest the same.

Stanton and Weld, Theodore Weld, Angelina's husband were very close.

They were very dear friends.

And they had been at Lane Theological Seminary together.

They've been through.

They've become evolutionists together.

The two older Stanton boys attended a school operated by Weld.

A fourth son, bore the name Theodore Weld Stanton in honor of his Godfather.

Inexplicably, years later when Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a history of the women's rights movement, though well acquainted with the sisters pioneering efforts, she failed to acknowledge their roles.

The Grimké sisters helped organize the first national feminist meeting in the United States.

It was the anti slavery convention of abolitionist women.

It was held in New York in May of 1837.

A hundred and seventy four women attended from eight states.

It predated Seneca Falls by eleven years.

That's the famous meeting that the Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped organize in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York.

They issued the famous declaration of sentiments.

On July 14th, 1848, the following announcement appeared in the Seneca Falls newspaper.

Women's rights convention, a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York on Wednesday and Thursday the nineteenth and twentieth of July current, commencing at ten o'clock A.M. During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively for women, which all are earnestly invited to attend.

The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and others, both ladies and gentlemen will address the convention.

So, in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton actually invited Sarah Grimké to Seneca Falls for the convention, but she did not attend.

Angelina also did not attend as she was now in the throes of child bearing and rearing.

Also absent were women of color.

Well actually at the Seneca Convention in 1848, there's only one person of color in attendance and that was Frederick Douglass.

No black women were invited to attend the Seneca Convention, where they created the new declaration of intents.

where they said all men and women are created equal.

Only one resolution proved controversial and that was the one declaring women's right to suffrage.

We hold a woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.

We go farther and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient to exercise it is equally so for women.

Among those opposed, were Lucretia Mott and her husband James.

It was Frederick Douglass influenced by the Grimkés who argued eloquently and passionately in favor of the resolution.

Of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, I knew but little personally.

These brave sisters from Charleston, South Carolina had inherited slaves, but in their conversion from the episcopacy to Quakerism in 1828 they became convinced that they had no right to such inheritance.

They emancipated their slaves and came North and entered at once upon the pioneer work in the advancing education a woman.

Though they saw then in their course only their duty to the slave.

They had fought the good fight before I came into the ranks, but by their unflinching testimony and unwavering courage, they had opened the way and made it possible if not easy for other women to follow their example.

And the fact that they did this I think laid the ground work for other Southern women, especially post Seneca Falls to do more of this.

And as we move forward towards the 20th century, I think that they served as examples of what could be done.

Following the war, Angelina came across a newspaper article in which a young man with the surname Grimké was mentioned.

They find out that their brother has sired several sons with his enslaved maid, Nancy Weston and they've basically adopt the boys and help sponsor their education and are proud that they use the Grimké name.

Henry Grimké died in 1852.

Upon his deathbed Archibald and Francis, along with their mother and their soon to be born brother John were entrusted to the care of Henry's oldest son with instructions they be treated as members of the family.

Disregarding his father's wishes, when the boys came of age, Montague Grimké claimed them as slaves, later selling Francis to a Confederate soldier while Archibald ran away.

Emancipation freed them reunited after the Civil War, the two older boys were sent North to school, while John remained in Charleston with his mother.

So the sisters, who didn't have a lot of money at that point, raised the money to pay for the tuition cost of sending their nephews to - Archibald went to Harvard Law School and Francis went to Princeton Theological Seminary.

And these two young men became leaders of their generation's civil rights movement.

Francis Grimké who married the abolitionist, educator and author Charlotte Forten, became a renowned Presbyterian minister, serving the 15th street Presbyterian church in Washington, DC.

Archibald, a lawyer, diplomat and civil rights activists was a national vice president of the NAACP.

His daughter Angelina Weld Grimké, became a well known playwright and poet.

So, they carried on the Grimké family tradition in ways that the sisters would have been very proud of.

After marriage and in frail health, Angelina left her household to speak only once and that was in support of Lincoln after the Civil War broke out.

Sarah Grimké also retired from public speaking.

Though many historians suggest it was partly in response to her brother in law's criticism.

Weld felt Sarah speaking inadequacies were damaging rather than helping the cause.

At 60, I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, severe discipline.

Yet, I have sometimes tasted exquisite joy and have found solace for many a woe in the innocent earnest love of Theodore's children.

But for this, my life would have little to record of mundane pleasures.

Sarah, nonetheless continued to field many requests to speak.

She, too wrote and lectured in support of Lincoln during the war.

Though removed from public activism, both sisters continued to write.

And Sarah, Angelina and Theodore all lived to see one goal accomplished, the emancipation of the slaves.

While they maintained close contact and correspondence with the family of their births, neither sister ever returned to South Carolina.

In March 1870 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, 50 years before the passage of the nineteenth amendment, they led a defiant march of women to the polls where they cast symbolic votes in the women's box, a show of support and hope for women's suffrage.

♪ One reason that we focus on Angelina a lot is that she was the better speaker of the two.

She was also the one that got them to be publicly engaged in the anti- slavery movement, but Sarah is the one who first broke with her family over slavery and moved to the North.

They were incredibly close to one another emotionally.

They accomplished so much together, but I don't think that it would have been possible for the either of them to have done it by themselves.

♪ ♪ harp strums This program is funded in part by a grant from South Carolina Humanities and the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.