Seared into Her Conscience

Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a slaveholder and judge in Charleston, South Carolina, was five years old in 1797 when the sight of an enslaved person being whipped seared her conscience. Like many white people before and after her, she was troubled in her body. It made her sick to her stomach. But Grimke was told this was how the world works. She was supposed to get used to it.

Instead, Grimke read voraciously in her father’s law library, trying to understand how it had become normal for white people to own and control black bodies. For over thirty years, she continued to question her…