Many people familiar with antebellum American history are acquainted with the white Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, famous for leaving behind their privileged southern plantation lives to become fierce abolitionist activists in the North. Odds are, not as many know about the Black Grimkes and their outsized contributions to achieving racial and gender equality in the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth. Historian Kerri K. Greenidge's meticulously researched The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family offers the full poignant story, revealing a complex picture of the Grimke clan and their often-fraught relationships with each other.

The Grimke family tree contained several branches, with given names often repeating themselves from generation to generation, so it is apt that Greenidge provides a "cast of characters" as the reader sets off. The ...