Anti-Slavery speech: Speaking as the Grimke sisters

Script for Grimke sisters speech 

Good evening. My name is Sarah Moore Grimké, of Charleston, South Carolina — though I no longer call it home, and I no longer stay silent about why.

Let me ask this room something before I go further. How many of you have grown up around something you knew was wrong, but everyone around you called normal?

I was born in 1792 into a family that owned enslaved people. My father was one of Charleston's most respected judges. Growing up in that house, I watched what slavery did, every single day, to the people forced to serve us. No one in my family ever suggested the arrangement was open to question. I had to come to that conclusion entirely on my own.

In 1819, I traveled to Philadelphia with my dying father, and there I encountered Quakers who spoke plainly about slavery as a moral catastrophe — the first people I had ever heard say it aloud. I left Charleston permanently in 1821. My younger sister Angelina, who I had helped raise, reached the same conclusion and joined me there in 1829. Most abolitionists in the North had never lived a single day inside a slaveholding household. I had lived nearly thirty years inside one. That is what I carried north with me — not theory, but memory.

Now — what would you do, once you believed something that strongly, and you'd just left the only home you'd known?

I wrote. In 1836, I published An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, appealing directly to the ministers of my home region to renounce slavery as a sin against scripture and against man. That same year, my sister published her own appeal — to the Christian women of the South — urging them to read, to pray, and to act against the system that sustained their households. When copies reached Charleston, the postmaster burned them in the street rather than let our own neighbors read them.

Writing was not enough. In 1836, we joined the American Anti-Slavery Society as its first female agents, trained to speak publicly for the cause. We began in parlors, addressing small groups of women — but the demand for what we knew, as Southerners who had lived inside slavery, grew too large to contain. By 1837, we were speaking to audiences of thousands across New England, testifying to what we had witnessed with our own eyes: not slavery as an abstraction, but as a daily, deliberate cruelty.

Ask yourselves — why did our testimony matter more than a Northern abolitionist's speech? Because we could not be accused of imagining it. We had grown up inside it. No pamphlet, no secondhand account, could be dismissed as easily as our own witness could not.

In 1839, together with Angelina and her husband Theodore Weld, I helped compile American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses — a documentation of slavery's brutality built entirely from the American South's own newspapers, so that no one could claim we had exaggerated a single line. It became one of the most widely read anti-slavery texts of its time, and Harriet Beecher Stowe read it before writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, later drawing on it heavily for her 1853 companion volume, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. A pamphlet built from slaveholders' own words, in slaveholders' own newspapers, went on to shape one of the most widely read novels in the world. That is what testimony can do, when enough of it accumulates that it can no longer be waved away.

I lived to be nearly eighty years old, and I spent almost every one of those years after Philadelphia working toward a single goal: the end of slavery in this country. I did not live to see it fully undone, in every sense — no one who fought this fight in my generation did. We did not have the comfort of knowing, while we were in it, that our side would win.

So I'll leave you with the question I started with. When you are standing in a house built on something cruel and ordinary — what will it take for you to say so out loud?

Thank you.