A major publisher appeared to pull a prizewinning history book about a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family and its role in the abolitionist movement, after several scholars accused the author of misleading readers about details that were central to what reviewers had described as a groundbreaking narrative.
The book, “The Grimkes,” and its author, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge, received widespread acclaim when the book was released in 2022 by Liveright Publishing.
Glowing write-ups came pouring in, including from The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, which named “The Grimkes” one of the 10 best books of 2022. In 2023, the American Historical Association awarded Greenidge with the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, which recognizes scholars in women’s history and feminist theory.
It was a high point for Greenidge, who has since reviewed multiple books for The Times and is part of an accomplished family. One of her sisters is the playwright Kirsten Greenidge and another is the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge.
But then things began to unravel for Kerri Greenidge, appearing to later cost her another book deal and her position as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.
Several other scholars, who described themselves as skeptical of some of Greenidge’s assertions in the book, started fact-checking her — scrutiny that Greenidge argued was racially motivated when asked for comment on Friday. Some of the criticism centered around whether Greenidge had properly credited sources.
“I said, ‘Where is she getting this?’” Myra C. Glenn, a retired professor of American history at Elmira College and the author of several books on U.S. history, said in an interview on Thursday. “Boy, it became a major problem.”
In March 2024, examining “The Grimkes” for Reviews in American History, a scholarly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Glenn raised concerns about the book’s credibility.
“Although well-written, ‘The Grimkes’ is also a deeply flawed book,” she wrote. “All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
In the review, Glenn noted that the book quoted letters exchanged between the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, “antebellum radicals who renounced their family heritage to campaign for abolitionism, racial equality, and women’s rights,” while the siblings discussed their biracial nephews.
But Glenn asserted in her review that the University of Michigan did not possess the letters in its archive, despite the book’s claims that they were kept there.
Glenn also disputed Greenidge’s account of an 1838 attack on Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia by an anti-abolitionist mob, which indicated that the Grimke sisters “led thousands of antislavery women through prayer” and helped them escape the “flaming building.”
“But as numerous sources have documented, no one was in the building when it was torched since antislavery activists cancelled a scheduled meeting, fearing impending violence,” Glenn wrote.
In an interview on Friday, Greenidge, who is Black, said that her life’s work had been torn down by white scholars who disagreed with her conclusions about racism, slavery and white supremacy.
“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” Greenidge said. “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
Greenidge denied any wrongdoing.
“I have never plagiarized anything in my life,” she said. “I have never fabricated anything.”
Still, she acknowledged: “Are there citations that were misattributed? Probably.”
Liveright Publishing, which is part of the publishing house W.W. Norton & Co., did not respond to requests for comment sent on Thursday and Friday.
“The Grimkes” was absent on Friday from a list of books written by Greenidge on her author page on the Norton website. A search for the book on the rest of the site did not turn up any results.
There was also no reference on the publisher’s site to “Black New England,” a history of Black radicalism that Liveright bought in 2024, according to Publishers Marketplace, a publishing trade publication and database.
In response to an inquiry, a spokesman for Tufts University, Patrick Collins, said in an email on Thursday that Greenidge was no longer employed by the Boston-area college. He declined to answer questions about when Greenidge left the university or discuss details of her departure.
In the email, Collins said the university became aware of the complaints that Greenidge’s book “contained multiple errors of fact and failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another” in December 2022, more than a year before Glenn published her critical review of the book.
“The university initiated a thorough peer review involving a panel of external scholars of American history which identified multiple errors of fact and citation,” Collins said. “In keeping with its commitment to ethical conduct in research, the university proactively moved to correct the public record by informing publisher W.W. Norton of the peer review findings.”
Greenidge declined to discuss details about her departure from Tufts or the status of her books or prizes.
She criticized the university’s peer review panel, which she said included two senior historians whom she described as hostile toward Black women in academia. She did not name them. She said that the university’s review was prompted by the complaints from a white woman scholar, whom she also declined to name. She said that she had sought a restraining order against that scholar.
Greenidge also raised questions about why The Times was writing about the accusations against her and the developments surrounding her book, suggesting that her race had played a part.
Tufts University defended its review process.
“The independent review by outside experts in the field was fair, fact-based, thorough, and objective,” Collins, the university spokesman, said in a follow-up message on Friday. “We stand by the review and strongly deny any allegations of bias.”
The Times reached out on Friday to about half a dozen historians, who either declined to comment about the book or did not respond to questions by press time.
The American Historical Association also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On a list of previous winners of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, there was no entry for 2023, the year that Greenidge received the award.
“The Grimkes” is not the only book by Greenidge drawing scholarly scrutiny.
“Black Radical,” Greenidge’s 2019 biography of the journalist and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, was also published by Liveright, and was reviewed positively in The Times. In 2020, it won the Mark Lynton History Prize, which is awarded by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
But for Stephen Fox, a historian who wrote a 1970 biography about Trotter, the book raised similar concerns.
“It seems well done, except when you look at the footnotes,” Fox said in an interview on Thursday.
Fox said that many of the sources cited in “Black Radical” did not correspond with the actual material when he checked them shortly after the book’s publication. Then, when he learned of the complaints concerning “The Grimkes,” he said, he began to wonder if it was a pattern.
“I started to think maybe it wasn’t just sloppy,” he said. “I think it’s something deeper.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
