The author of an award-winning book on slavery and abolition is facing renewed scrutiny from historians over disputed claims, sourcing issues and alleged factual errors in her work.
Kerri Greenidge’s 2022 book, “The Grimkes,” examines a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family whose members later became connected to the abolitionist movement. The book received widespread critical praise and won the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize.
Questions about the book have intensified as historians and scholars have reviewed its arguments and documentation, among them Myra Glenn, an author and retired professor of American history at Elmira College.
In a 2024 critique of “The Grimkes,” Glenn described the book as “deeply flawed” and argued that Greenidge “all too often lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims.”
Glenn also wrote that the book is “riddled with factual errors” and said it repeatedly fails to include endnotes where supporting documentation is needed.
After the New York Times presented Greenidge with Glenn’s analysis and other challenged findings, the author defended her work and suggested the criticism reflected broader racial and gender bias in academia.
“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” Greenidge told the outlet. “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
Greenidge denied plagiarizing or fabricating material, though she acknowledged that some citation problems may exist, saying, “are there citations that were misattributed? Probably.”
The resulting firestorm has since seen “The Grimkes” removed from her author page on the publisher’s website, and her entry as a winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize was absent from the American Historical Association’s homepage.
She also seems to have lost her job as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, a spokesman for the greater Boston school telling the Times that she was no longer employed there.
The spokesman declined to elaborate on the reason for her departure, however.
Pressed by the outlet over the accelerating cascade of scrutiny, including her apparent removal from Tufts and the forfeiture of her prizes, Greenidge again claimed it was all the work of anti-black sentiment.
She accused two senior historians on the university’s peer review panel of being “hostile toward black women in academia,” and argued the review process by the school was kicked off by complaints from a white woman scholar. She declined to name any of the individuals in question.
She even hinted that her race played a part in the lefty New York Times writing about the accusations in the first place.
Now another one of Greenidge’s books, “Black Radical,” which also had praise heaped upon it, is now being given a closer look.
The 2019 biography about journalist and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter also received a glowing review by the New York Times and won the Mark Lynton History Prize, awarded by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation of Journalism at Harvard University.
Historian and author Stephen Fox, who wrote a biography about Trotter in 1970, said many of Greenidge’s sources cited in the book didn’t match the material when he checked after the book was published.
Then when he heard about the controversy bubbling up over “The Grimkes” he started questioning her rigor even more.
“I started to think maybe it wasn’t just sloppy,” he told the outlet. “I think it’s something deeper.”
