The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era

by Charlotte L. Forten, Ray Allen Billington (Editor)

Charlotte L. Forten (1838-1914) was sensitive, intelligent, and educated in the culture and conventions of pre-Civil War America. But one thing distinguished her from other young Philadelphia women: she was black, destined to endure the constant insults that were accorded any person of color in her day. Her remarkable diary reveals how her resentment against the prejudice of the white world became transformed into an iron determination to excel. Impatient to help the self-advancement of other blacks, she went to Massachusetts to become a teacher and became active in literary and abolitionist circles. Then, during the Civil War, she traveled to South Carolina to participate in a unique social experiment involving newly freed blacks of the Sea Islands. In 1878 she married the Reverand Francis J. Grimké, the son of Henry Grimké whose two sisters, Sarah and Angelina, were prominent abolitionists. Charlotte Forten’s zeal for justice and her personal renderings of the events and people of her day make her journal an important document in American social history. Her bequest to humanity, Ray Allen Billington writes, “was a journal which could reveal to a later generation her undying belief in human decency and equality.”

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, African American, Collections, Memoir, Race

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1961

Reviews

[Tom]

I refuse to rate someone’s diary, but this was a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day of a middle-class Black woman before and during the Civil War. Plus she crossed paths with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Tubman – what a life!

She could also write with uncommon power about racism. Check out this banger:

I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind. I have met girls in the schoolroom[—]they have been thoroughly kind and cordial to me,—perhaps the next day met them in the street—they feared to recognize me; these I can but regard now with scorn and contempt,—once I liked them, believing them incapable of such meanness. Others give the most distant recognitions possible.—I, of course, acknowledge no such recognitions, and they soon cease entirely. These are but trifles, certainly, to the great, public wrongs which we as a people are obliged to endure. But to those who experience them, these apparent trifles are most wearing and discouraging; even to the child’s mind they reveal volumes of deceit and heartlessness, and early teach a lesson of suspicion and distrust. Oh! it is hard to go through life meeting contempt with contempt, hatred with hatred, fearing, with too good reason, to love and trust hardly any one whose skin is white,—however lovable, attractive and congenial in seeming. In the bitter, passionate feelings of my soul again and again there rises the questions “When, oh! when shall this cease?” “Is there no help?” “How long oh! how long must we continue to suffer—to endure?” Conscience answers it is wrong, it is ignoble to despair; let us labor earnestly and faithfully to acquire knowledge, to break down the barriers of prejudice and oppression. Let us take courage; never ceasing to work,—hoping and believing that if not for us, for another generation there is a better, brighter day in store,—when slavery and prejudice shall vanish before the glorious light of Liberty and Truth; when the rights of every colored man shall everywhere be acknowledged and respected, and he shall be treated as a man and a brother.

Written when she was just 18!

[Humberto · Rating 1 out of 5]

An anecdotal account of the late antebellum period in america. the author is perhaps the most inane person i have ever read. avoid.