"THE STREAMS OF BLACK HISTORY"

 “The Streams of Black History”

As we enter a very difficult period in American history, we would do well to remember and learn from those who have found life and fought for freedom in more difficult times.  It is one of the gifts of Black History Month which calls us to remember the ancestors and learn from their witness.  

    Charlotte Forten was born in Philadelphia in 1837 as a free Black person, one of the granddaughters of one of the Black wealthiest men in America, James Forten.  She was educated by private tutors, and she became a well-educated woman and a poet.  In the 1850’s, she became involved in the abolitionist movement, penning poems about freedom that William Lloyd Garrison published in “The Liberator,” and that Frederick Douglass published in “North Star.”

After the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Union forces moved to cut off sea lanes from the South.  Early on, they took possession of the Sea Islands near Beaufort, South Carolina, and all the white plantation owners fled the Islands.  In order to prepare for the aftermath of the Civil War, the War Department decided to start schools for Black people  on the Sea Islands, seeking to ascertain what kind of education would be needed by those who were formerly enslaved.  

    This project was called “The Port Royal Experiment,” and many white teachers came down to teach the formerly enslaved people to read and write.  Charlotte Forten had been teaching in the North already, and though she encountered some resistance among the white leadership, she decided to come down to St. Helena Island to teach in the Penn School, as part of the Port Royal Experiment.  She was the first Black teacher there.  She taught there until the end of the Civil War.

After the Civil War, she taught in Massachusetts and back in Charleston, SC, until she moved to DC in 1872 to teach.  There she met the Rev. Francis Grimke, and they were married in 1878. In that marriage, she stepped into another stream of Black history.  Francis Grimke was the nephew of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, two white South Carolina sisters who were anti-slavery and who left the South before the Civil War.  They became famous abolitionists and feminists. 

     Also before the Civil War, the Grimke sisters discovered that their brother Henry Grimke had a relationship with one of his enslaved women, Nancy Weston.  Out of this union came three sons, one of whom was Francis Grimke.  Francis and his brother Archibald escaped from slavery, and they made contact with their aunts. The Grimke sisters helped to finance Francis’s seminary education at Princeton, and they generally supported Francis and his brother Archibald.  Francis later became pastor at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in DC, where he served for almost 50 years.   He helped to found the Niagara Movement with WEB Dubois and later the NAACP.  

    He and Charlotte Forten made a formidable team fo justice, service, and equity.  She wrote a famous journal about her experiences in the Port Royal Experiment and in the white world. Charlotte Forten and Francis Grimke were one of several streams of Black history that came together and improved life for all of us.  May we find our place in those same streams now, because the water will be getting rougher for the next few years.