1. What is the central problem that I am investigating? I am investigating the lives, works, and rhetoric of Sarah and Angelina Grimké from a specific perspective: a civil rights perspective.
2. What does the historiography on my topic consist of? Historiography on the Grimké sisters is extremely limited. In the last forty to fifty years, a small number of scholars, particularly Gerda Lerner, Elizabeth Bartlett, and Carolyn Williams, have begun to examine the lives and written works of Sarah and Angelina from a gender perspective. Williams, for example, argues that the Grimké sisters forged a substantial link between abolitionism and feminism” during their brief foray into the public realm of abolitionist politics. She also reveals that the…show more content… What is the central argument of the essay? As I mentioned previously, scholars of the Modern Civil Rights Movement have primarily centered their academic concentration on the endeavors of a few African American civil rights activists. While the numerous accomplishments of these civil rights champions are indisputably deserving of remembrance and immortalization, the sacrifices and contributions of lesser known civil rights advocates are equally worthy of acknowledgement. I argue that although the Grimké sisters were incontrovertible supporters of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement, they simultaneously generated an unprecedented discourse on African American civil liberties one hundred and twenty-five years before the modern Civil Rights Movement took place. Therefore, Sarah and Angelina Grimké are unequivocally deserving of recognition as important precursors to the modern Civil Rights Movement. Throughout my paper I examine the civil rights rhetoric of the Grimké sisters and the various methods the used to promote African American civil rights. For instance, the Grimké sisters and other abolitionists passionately advocated the concepts of nonresistance and nonviolence when responding to violent protestors. Remarkably, these peaceful methods of noncooperation were later championed by Martin Luther King Jr. during the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Hence, a direct correlation can be drawn between the ideological principles and non-violent practices of nineteenth-century abolitionists, and twentieth-century civil rights