Tiya Miles: Fulfilling the Promise of America

In honor of Women's History Month, Tiya Miles revisits the timeless message of 19th-century abolitionist Angelina Grimké: “The ground upon which you stand is holy ground; never—never surrender it."

Protestors in Washington, D.C., after a grand jury decided not to indict an NYPD officer for the choking death of Eric Garner, Dec.13, 2014. (iStock/coast-to-coast)

By Tiya Miles

Angelina Grimké did not mature into the demure Southern lady that her slaveholding parents expected.

Instead, moved by the racial violence she witnessed on her wealthy family’s South Carolina plantation, by her Christian conviction, and her avid reading of current events in the abolitionist press, Grimké became an outspoken critic of slave society and the increasingly violent opposition to Black freedom flagrantly displayed in pro-slavery mob violence.

In October 1835, following an attack on abolitionist organizers in Boston, Grimké insisted to William Lloyd Garrison, in a letter Garrison later published in his newspaper, The Liberator: “The ground upon which you stand is holy ground; never—never surrender it.”

To Grimké and fellow white abolitionists who had waged a war of ideas against slavery for years, the fi…