Charlotte Forten Grimké

Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten was born free in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of August 1837, the daughter of Robert Bridges Forten — a Black abolitionist and free-Black activist of the third generation in the prominent Forten family of Philadelphia. She was educated by tutors at home (Philadelphia's segregated public schools were closed to her family by choice) and at the Higginson Grammar School and the Salem Normal School in Salem, Massachusetts, where she became the first African American hired to teach white students in the public schools of New England in 1856.

In 1862 — at twenty-five — she travelled to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, to teach the formerly enslaved children of the Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment, the federally-supervised education and land-redistribution program established on the Sea Islands after they were liberated by Union forces in 1861. She taught there for two years. Her journals from the period, published as Life on the Sea Islands in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864 and posthumously in expanded form as The Journals of Charlotte Forten in 1953, are among the principal first-person accounts of the experiment.

She returned north in 1864, married the Presbyterian minister Francis James Grimké — nephew of the white South Carolina abolitionist Grimké sisters — in 1878, and worked through the next four decades as a teacher, writer, and senior figure of Washington, D.C.'s Black intellectual community alongside Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell — both placed in this archive.

She died in Washington on the twenty-third of July 1914, age seventy-six.

She is honored here as the first Black teacher in a Northern white classroom, and the chronicler of the Port Royal Experiment.