Charlotte Forten Grimké

Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten was born free in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of August 1837, into one of the most distinguished Black families of the antebellum North. She was the granddaughter of James Forten, the wealthy sailmaker and abolitionist, and the daughter of Robert Bridges Forten, himself an activist in the free-Black struggle. Because Philadelphia's schools were segregated, her father sent her to Salem, Massachusetts, to be educated among those he trusted to teach her without insult.

In Salem she entered the Salem Normal School, graduating in 1856, and was hired to teach at the Epes Grammar School — becoming the first African American engaged to teach white pupils in a Salem public school. She joined the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society and began publishing verse and prose in antislavery periodicals, including William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, lending her pen to the cause of freedom.

In the autumn of 1862, during the Civil War, she journeyed south to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, joining the Penn School as part of the Port Royal Experiment — the first Black teacher to instruct the formerly enslaved children of the Sea Islands. Her essays "Life on the Sea Islands," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864, and the five volumes of journals she kept remain a rare and luminous record of a free Black woman's inner life and witness.

In December 1878 she married the Reverend Francis J. Grimké, and in her later years in Washington she helped found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. She died on the twenty-third of July 1914. May the diarist who kept faith with truth, and taught the newly free to read their own names, be honored without end.