The author of an acclaimed book about slavery is crying racism after her writing came under scrutiny by scholars for questionable assertions and sloppy sourcing.
Kerri Greenidge’s 2022 book “The Grimkes,” which tells the story of a prominent South Carolina slaveholder family who later played a role in the abolitionist movement, was lauded by critics and won the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize.
But skepticism grew as her prose came under the microscope by historians and scholars, including Myra Glenn, an author and retired American history professor at Elmira College.
In a 2024 examination of “The Grimkes,” Glenn called it “deeply flawed,” and called out that Greenidge “all too often lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims.”
She added that “her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
Presented with these and other disputed findings discovered through Glenn’s analysis by the New York Times, Greenidge immediately cast herself as the victim, and accused her growing roster of critics of racism.
“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” she told the outlet. “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
Though she claimed to have never plagiarized or fabricated anything, she conceded “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.”
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