The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 395, Dec. 1887, U. of Illinois Press

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DECEMBER · 1887 your scholars should send him a present, wall you have the kindness to let me know what it is, as ~ fee] greatly interested in the matter. Mr. Grimke2 is well & joins me in kindest regards to you & Mrs. Washington & the dear little girl whose picture I prize very highly. Believe me, Very truly yours ALS Con. 88 BTW Papers DLC. Charlotte F. GrimLe ~ Charlotte L. shorten Grimke (~837-~9~4), granddaughter of the wealthy black Philadelphia sailmaker and abolitionist James Forten, married Francis I. Grimke in 1878. Born in Philadelphia, she was educated by tutors in her grandfather's home and in the home of her uncle, Robert Purvis. Sent to Salem, Mass., in 1854 to live with the black Salem abolitionist Charles Lenox Remand and to attend the Salem public schools, she graduated from Salem Normal School in 1856 and began teaching in the Epes Grammar School in Salem. During the Civil War she worked as a teacher among the freed slaves in Port Royal, S.C. Her journal of the Port Royal years is one of the most vivid documents of social history of the Civil War era. 2 Francis J. Grimke was born in Charleston, S.C., Nov. 4, 1850. He and his brother Archibald were children of a slave mother and a wealthy planter father, Henry Grimke, whose sisters, Sarah and Angelina, were prominent abolitionists. Freed upon his father's death in 185a and put under the guardianship of his white half-brother, Francis Grimke escaped at the age of ten when his half-brother threatened to reenslave him. He served as a Confederate officer's valet for two years, returned in illness to his mother's home, and was sold to an officer for the remainder of the war. After attending school briefly in Charleston, Grimke went north with his brother Archibald, eventually gaining entry to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. While he was at Lincoln his Aunt Angelina, now the wife of Theodore Dwight Weld, discovered his identity and publicly proclaimed her relationship. Graduating as valedictorian in 1870, Francis Grimke studied law at Lincoln and Howard until 1875 and then attended Princeton Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1878. A few months before his graduation from Princeton he married Charlotte Forten. He served as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington until ill health drove him to assume the pastorale of the Laurel Street Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1885. He returned to his Washington church in 1889 and remained at its head until his death in 1937. In the :880s and logos Grimke supported BTW enthusiastically, working to counteract criticism of the Tuskegean among his friends. Grimke wrote to The Christian Register in 1886: ''The school speaks for itself. It has demonstrated its right to the respect, confidence, and generous support of the friends of education everywhere, especially of the education and elevation of the emancipated millions of the South. In this respect, it is doing a work whose importance cannot be overestimated.'' ~ Christian Register, 65 [Mar. o5, ~ 886], ~ 8~. ~ After Too, however, BTW's accommodating stand on disfranchisement and other racial issues turned Grimke away from Tuskegee and toward BTW's opponents. He signed the call for the National Negro Conference in 1909 that led to the founding of the NAACP and later served as president of its Washington branch. 395