Angelina Weld Grimké (February 27, 1880 – June 10, 1958) was an African-American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who was part of the Harlem Renaissance and was one of the first African-American women to have a play performed. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880 to a biracial family, whose ancestors included slaveholders, abolitionists, European-American slaves, and Midwesterners. Her father, Archibald Grimké was a lawyer, the second black man to have graduated from Harvard Law School. He was appointed consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894-1898. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was a white woman from a Midwestern middle-class family, about whom information is scarce. Grimké’s parents met in Boston. Archibald Grimké had established a law practice there after completing law school. He and Sarah Stanley married but faced much opposition from her family, due to concerns over race. The marriage did not last very long. Not too long after Angelina’s birth, Sarah left the family and took Angelina with her to the Midwest. After Sarah began a career of her own, she sent Angelina, then seven, back to Massachusetts to live with her father. Angelina Grimké would have little to no contact with her mother after that. Sarah Stanley committed suicide several years later. Grimké’s great aunts were the famous abolitionists, Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Her paternal grandfather was their brother Henry Grimké, of their large, slaveholding family based in Charleston, South Carolina. Her paternal grandmother was Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman, with whom Henry became involved after becoming a widower. They lived together and had three sons: Archibald, Francis and John. Her uncle, Francis J. Grimké, graduated from Lincoln University, PA and Princeton Theological Seminary and became a Presbyterian minister in Washington, DC. He married abolitionist and diarist Charlotte Forten, of the prominent black abolitionist family from Philadelphia. Between 1894 and 1898, Angelina lived with her uncle and aunt in Washington, DC, while her father served as consul in the Dominican Republic. Grimké was also related to John Grimké Drayton of Magnolia Plantation. Angelina Grimké attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (now Wellesley College). After graduating, she moved to Washington, D.C. with her father. In 1902, she began teaching English at Armstrong Manual Training school. She then left this position in 1916 to teach at the legendary Dunbar High School, where one of her pupils was the poet/playwright May Miller. In addition, she frequently took classes at Harvard University during the summers. Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, Opportunity, The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. Some of her more famous poems include, “The Eyes of My Regret”, “At April”, and “Trees”. She was an active writer and activist included among the figures of the Harlem Renaissance. She counted as one of her friends during that time the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. Grimké also wrote a play called Rachel, one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence. She wrote the three-act drama for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) to rally public support against the recently released film The Birth of a Nation. The play was produced in 1916 in Washington, D.C., performed by an all-black cast. It was published in 1920. “Rachel” portrays the realities of life for an African American family in the north, in the early 20th Century. Centered on the family of the title character, each role mirrors the different reactions to the racial discrimination against blacks at the time. The themes of motherhood and the innocence of children are integral pieces of what Grimké was highlighting. The development of Rachel herself, revolves around her changing perception of what the role of a mother might be, based on her understanding of the importance of child-like naiveté towards the terrible truths of the world around them. Having the lynching act as the specter of the play, authenticates the African American experience and successfully countering the false narrative of Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”. The Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 50, 1986, states “In several poems and in her diaries Grimké expressed the frustration that her lesbianism created; thwarted longing is a theme in several poems” . Some of her unpublished poems are more explicitly lesbian, implying that she lived a life of suppression, “both personal and creative” . After her father died, Grimké left Washington, DC, for New York, where she lived a reclusive life in Brooklyn. She died in 1958.
Angelina Weld Grimké
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