Charlotte Forten Grimké

Born free in 1837 into one of Philadelphia's most prominent Black abolitionist families, Charlotte Forten's father refused to send her to a state-mandated segregated school, so she was educated privately before moving to Salem, Massachusetts, to attend public school. There she boarded with Charles Lenox Remond, a leading Black abolitionist, and joined the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society at seventeen.

After training at Salem Normal School, she became the first and only Black teacher at Salem's all-white Eppes Grammar School and began publishing poetry in antislavery periodicals including The Liberator. In 1862, at age 20, she traveled to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to join the Port Royal Experiment, becoming the first Black teacher in Beaufort County when she joined the staff of Penn School on St. Helena Island. She kept detailed journals during this period and published an account of her experience, “Life on the Sea Islands,” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864. After the war she taught in Boston and Charleston, then moved to Washington, D.C. in 1872, where she taught at what became Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and later worked as a Treasury Department clerk. At 41, she married Rev. Francis J. Grimké, a former slave and minister; in 1896 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women.

Key contributions

• First Black teacher at Salem's all-white Eppes Grammar School.
• First Black teacher in Beaufort County, South Carolina, joining Penn School on St. Helena Island in 1862.
• Documented the Port Royal Experiment in “Life on the Sea Islands,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1864.
• Kept extensive personal journals later published as The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (1988).
• Helped found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

Context

Grimké's work at Penn School placed her at the center of the Port Royal Experiment, an early wartime effort to educate and support formerly enslaved people on South Carolina's Sea Islands — one of the first large-scale tests of what freedom and education might look like before the war had even ended. Her journals remain a rare, direct written record of a free Black Northern woman's perspective on that experiment.

In their spirit: Show up where freedom is still being figured out, and write down what you see.

About this set

Grimké's card is one of six in Set 1B — Freedom's First Draft, part of the Lineage: Origin Fire digital postcard collection. Freedom's First Draft gathers women who wrote, testified, and organized the first records of their own freedom.

Shop the Freedom's First Draft set or get the Complete Collection (all 12 cards).

Sources: National Park Service — Charlotte Forten Grimké biography; Encyclopedia Britannica — Charlotte Forten Grimke.