Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Independent.

Archibald Grimke (1849-1930) has at last received the scholarly attention he deserves in this first full-length biography by Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Identified with many causes, including women's rights, economic reforms, and prohibition, Grimke was preeminently a champion of a fully integrated society shorn of all forms of racial segregation and discrimination. He battled racism and its manifestations wherever he found them, but often did so in ways that diverged from those of other African American leaders. Written in lean, graceful prose, Bruce's study rests on deep and wide-ranging research, especially in the large collection of Grimke family papers at Howard University and Grimke's numerous published works. The result is a skillfully drawn portrait of an original thinker and tough-minded activist.

Archibald Grimke was the son of Henry Grimke, a member of an old South Carolina family noted for its wealth, culture, and eminence in public affairs. Unlike his sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who became conspicuous in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements in the North, Henry Grimke maintained a strong attachment to slavery and white supremacy. Notwithstanding his belief in the inferiority of African Americans, he established a liaison with Nancy Weston, a mulatto slave who had nursed his wife in her final illness and cared for his children and who managed his rice plantation. The first-born in Grimke's "second family" across the color line was Archibald, who significantly was named by his father. Grimke maintained a "distant but affectionate" relationship with his second family, and he never treated either his three mulatto sons or their mother as slaves. At his death in 1852, his white son, Montague, inherited his father's "shadow" family and for eight years thereafter ignored but did not free Nancy Weston and her sons. Their quasi-free status abruptly ended in 1860 when Montague Grimke subjected them to the most degrading form of slavery, replete with floggings and imprisonment. Unwilling to tolerate the cruelty of his white half-brother, Archibald escaped and hid out in Charleston until the city was liberated by the Union Army in 1865.

Once legally free, Archibald and his brother Francis for the first time regularly attended school. The Grimke boys came to the attention of the Pillsburys, white New Englanders residing in Charleston who arranged for them to enter Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Here they were discovered by their aunts, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who assumed the role of parents and sought to mold them "into the kind of individuals they admired." The young men were selective in following the abundant advice provided by their famous aunts, but both did pursue advanced study, Francis at Princeton Seminary and Archibald at Harvard Law School. Graduating in 1874, Archibald began the practice of law in Boston, where through his aunts and their friends he gained entry to the so-called "Boston clique," a group that fostered the ideals of abolitionism. For the next half-century, as he moved with ease in both the white and black worlds, he continued and added luster to the Grimke tradition by making his mark in law, journalism, literature, public affairs, and civil rights activism.

Unquestionably, Grimke's white relatives helped shape his thought and career - he never forgot the floggings at the hands of his white half-brother or the assistance of his white aunts - but, as his biographer makes clear, the central figure in his life was his mother, a fiercely independent and resourceful woman who held the family together and provided it with its moral center. Never hesitant to resist an insult or wrong, she "raised her sons in a way that distanced them from the institution [of slavery] as much as possible." Nancy Weston's unwillingness to accommodate to slavery was mirrored in her son's resolute opposition to anything less than complete equality for African Americans.

That Grimke exhibited throughout his career a penchant for independence in his roles as intellectual, politician, and activist is the underlying theme of this superb biography. Its detailed and illuminating analysis of his intellectual quest for new perspectives on the problem of racial oppression is based on the sizable body of his published works, including well-received biographies of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner, numerous papers issued by the American Negro Academy, and scores of magazine and newspaper articles. Of fundamental importance in shaping Grimke's thought was the influence of abolitionism, which buttressed his militancy in pressing the case of equal justice and Emersonian transcendentalism, with its emphasis on a world governed by moral law, which reinforced his commitment to action and optimism in the most difficult times. His thought later assumed a decidedly economic orientation, due in part to the influence of works by T. Thomas Fortune and Henry George. But throughout his career Grimke attacked as misguided those African Americans who stressed racial identity and unity, even to the point of segregation; he insisted on balancing "manhood" with "racehood," so that the latter would not place limits on him or other African Americans. Because Grimke "gave no place to a distinctly black way of looking at the world," he took exception to W. E. B. Du Bois's emphasis on black distinctiveness as both a complement and an alternative to the dominant society in the United States. Such an emphasis, in Grimke's view, could be used to justify "a caste system . . . along the color line."

Despite his prominence in the affairs of numerous organizations, especially the American Negro Academy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and both major political parties, Grimke never functioned as an "organization man" and insisted on his right, indeed his responsibility, to pursue the course he considered most effective in combatting racial injustice. Not surprisingly, party regularity in politics had little appeal for him. Beginning his political career in 1883 as a Republican in Boston, where he edited a black newspaper, he later shifted his allegiance to the Democratic Party and was ultimately rewarded with an appointment as consul to Santo Domingo, a post that he filled with competence and honor between 1894 and 1898. He endorsed Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 but parted ways with him over his treatment of black soldiers accused of involvement in the Brownsville incident. He returned briefly to the Democratic fold four years later. Disillusioned with the existing party structure, Grimke outraged many African American politicians by championing Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1912; he did so on the grounds that the third party offered the best hope for altering the wholesale disfranchisement of black voters in the South.

Few other portions of this work demonstrate so clearly Bruce's mastery of the art of biography as those assessing Grimke's complex relationships with African American advocates of different and competing strategies for thwarting the rising tide of Jim Crowism. Foremost among such strategists, in terms of prestige and power, was Booker T. Washington, whom Grimke genuinely liked as an individual. He also appreciated Washington's work among rural blacks and understood his use of dissimulation in dealing with whites, even perhaps seeing him as another Denmark Vesey. Even though Grimke was identified with Washington for some years, he never subscribed to his accommodationist approach to segregation and remained as outspoken as ever in condemning all evidences of white prejudice. The hope of using Washington's powerful organization to achieve more militant objectives accounted for his willingness to remain associated with the Washington camp for so long.

Once Grimke cast his lot with Washington's opponents, he found an outlet for his activism in the NAACP. He not only served on the board of directors of the national organization for a decade (1913-1923), but also headed its largest and most influential local chapter in the District of Columbia, a position that he used to monitor and influence action on racial matters at the federal level. Although Grimke had become acquainted with Du Bois earlier, it was through the NAACP that their differences evolved into a full-fledged feud. Emerging as the leader of the anti-Du Bois faction of the NAACP board of directors, Grimke on one occasion bluntly reminded Du Bois of his error in putting "all our difficulties on the ground of race prejudice."

Bruce's assessment of the Grimke-Du Bois struggle clearly indicates that it involved ideological differences as well as a personality clash between two talented, strong-willed, and sharp-tongued individuals. By the mid-1920s Grimke found his views out of step with prevailing African American thought, which celebrated Du Bois's idea of racial distinctiveness.

Bruce has provided a richly textured, multi-dimensional portrait of Grimke that skillfully weaves together the lives of the private individual and the public man. Especially revealing are his treatments of Grimke's marriage across the color line that produced a daughter and ended after four years, the close relationship between him and his daughter Angelina Weld Grimke, whom he reared, and his lengthy courtship of Bertha Bauman. While Bruce has shied away from psychoanalyzing his subject, it is clear that Grimke possessed an original mind and abundant energy and that his relationships in private, as well as public, life were incredibly complex.

Informed by Bruce's knowledge of African American literature and history, this thorough examination of the career of Archibald Grimke vastly enriches our understanding of race relations and the dynamics of African American thought and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.