Angelina Weld Grimké

Angelina Weld Grimké
Born	(1880-02-27)27 February 1880 Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Died	10 June 1958(1958-06-10) (aged 78) New York City, New York, USA
Education	Wellesley College
Occupation	Author, journalist, poet

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; she was one of the first African-American women to have a play performed.^[1]

Biography

Early life and education

Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880 to a biracial family. Her father, Archibald Grimké, was a lawyer, the second African American to have graduated from Harvard Law School. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was European American from a Midwestern middle-class family. Information about her is scarce. Grimké's parents met in Boston, where he had established a law practice. Angelina was named for her father's aunt Angelina Grimké Weld, who with her sister Sarah Grimké had brought him and his brothers into her family after learning about him. (He was a natural son of her brother, who had died.)

When Grimké and Sarah Stanley married, they faced strong opposition from her family, due to concerns over race. The marriage did not last very long. Not long after Angelina's birth, Sarah left Archibald and returned with the infant 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.

Angelina's paternal grandfather was Henry Grimké, of a large and wealthy slaveholding family based in Charleston, South Carolina. Her paternal grandmother was Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman of mixed race, with whom Henry became involved as a widower. They lived together and had three sons: Archibald, Francis and John (born after his father's death in 1852). Henry taught Nancy and the boys to read and write. Among Henry's family were two sisters who had opposed slavery and left the South before he began his relationship with Weston; Sarah and Angelina Grimké became notable abolitionists in the North. The Grimkés were also related to John Grimké Drayton of Magnolia Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina.

Angelina's uncle, Francis J. Grimké, graduated from Lincoln University, PA and Princeton Theological Seminary. He became a Presbyterian minister in Washington, DC. He married Charlotte Forten, who became known as an abolitionist and diarist. She was from a prominent black abolitionist family from Philadelphia. From the ages of 14 to 18, Angelina lived with her aunt and uncle in Washington, DC and attended school there, as her father was serving as appointed consul (1894 and 1898) to the Dominican Republic,

Angelina Grimké next attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (now Wellesley College). After graduating, she and her father moved to Washington, D.C. to be with his brother and family.

Career

In 1902, Grimké began teaching English at the Armstrong Manual Training School. In 1916 she moved to a teaching position at the Dunbar High School, renowned for its academic excellence, where one of her pupils was the future poet/playwright May Miller. She frequently took classes at Harvard University during the summers.

Literary career

Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, the newspaper of the NAACP, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois; and Opportunity. They were also collected in anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. Some of her more well-known poems include, "The Eyes of My Regret", "At April", "Trees" and "The Closing Door". While living in Washington, DC, she was included among the figures of the Harlem Renaissance, as her work was published in its journals and she became connected to figures in its circle. Some critics place her in the period before the Renaissance. During that time, she counted the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson as one of her friends.

Grimké wrote Rachel, one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence.^{[citation needed]} She wrote the three-act drama for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which called for new works to rally public opinion against the recently released film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Directed by D. W. Griffith, it glorified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed a racist view of blacks and of their role in the American Civil War and Reconstruction in the South. Produced in 1916 in Washington, D.C., Rachel was performed by an all-black cast. It was published in 1920.

Rachel portrays the life of an African-American family in the North in the early 20th century. Centered on the family of the title character, each role expresses different responses to the racial discrimination against blacks at the time. The themes of motherhood and the innocence of children are integral aspects of Grimké's work. Rachel develops as she changes her perceptions of what the role of a mother might be, based on her sense of the importance of a naiveté towards the terrible truths of the world her. A lynching is the spectre of the play; it authenticates the African-American experience.^{[citation needed]}

Modern literary critics have revealed that Grimke was lesbian. Some critics believe this is expressed in her pubished poetry in a subtle way, but it was revealed after her death by scholars' study of her diaries and more explicit unpublished works. The Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, states, "In several poems and in her diaries Grimké expressed the frustration that her lesbianism created; thwarted longing is a theme in several poems".^[2] Some of her unpublished poems are more explicitly lesbian, implying that she lived a life of suppression, "both personal and creative.”^[2]

After her father died in 1930, Grimké left Washington, DC, for New York. She settled in Brooklyn, where she lived in a quiet retirement. She died in 1958.

References

Further reading

• Hull, Akasha. "'Under the Days': The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké." in Smith, Barbara. ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000.
• Jayasundera, Ymitri. "Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)." in Nelson, Emmanuel S. ed. African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
• Mitchell, Koritha A. "Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama." in McCaskill, Barbara and Gebhard, Caroline. eds. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, NY: New York UP, 2006.
• Parker, Alison M. Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State, DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2010.
• Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. Early Black American Playwrights & Dramatic Writers, NY: Greenwood Press, 1990.
• Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
• Wilbanks, Charles. ed. Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimké, 1828-1835, Columbia: U of South Carolina P; 2003.
• Carol Sears Botsch (1997). Archibald Grimke. University of South Carolina-Aiken. http://www.usca.edu/aasc/grimke.htm. 
• Perry, Mark, Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders, New York: Viking Penguin, 2002. ISBN 978-0-14-200103-5
• Shockley, Ann Allen, Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2

External links

• "Angelina Weld Grimke", PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide, California State University-Stanislaus
• "Angelina Weld Grimke", Modern American Poetry Profile, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign