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Life Story: Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)

Literature as Activism

The story of a writer who used her work to raise awareness about the plight of Black Americans.

NOTE: This life story contains a brief mention of suicide. It also contains discussion of depictions of lynching.

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Life Story: Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)
Angelina W. Grimké.

Angelina W. Grimké, 1923. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1923. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-1ecf-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston in 1880. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was a white woman from a prominent midwestern family. Her father, Archibald Grimké, was born into slavery in South Carolina. Archibald’s father was his enslaver and the brother of groundbreaking abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. After the US Civil War abolished the practice of slavery in the US, Angelina and Sarah were able to meet Archibald for the first time and welcome him into their family. Archibald went to college and law school. After graduating he opened a successful law practice and became a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

Sarah and Archibald’s marriage was met with strong resistance because mixed-race couples were not socially accepted in the late 1800s and many states banned interracial marriages. They named their only daughter in honor of Archibald’s aunt. Unfortunately, their union did not last long. Sarah and Archibald separated when Angelina was three years old, and Sarah took her daughter to live in the Midwest. When Sarah started a new career in 1887 she returned Angelina to Archibald’s care. Angelina never saw her mother again. Sarah died by suicide in 1889. 

Archibald made sure Angelina attended all the best schools in Boston, and when he was called to serve as consul to the Dominican Republic in 1914, he sent Angelina to live with her aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C. rather than risk disrupting her education. Angelina returned to Boston to attend college at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. She took additional classes at Harvard University and graduated in 1902 with a degree in physical education. After graduation, Angelina moved with her father to Washington, D.C., where she took a job as a physical education teacher. 

Around this time, Angelina started writing. She wrote poetry, short stories, and plays that dealt with social justice issues facing Black Americans. In her work, Angelina did not shy away from writing about the violence committed against Black Americans. In 1916 Angela wrote her most famous play, Rachel. She took up the project after prominent Black rights advocate W. E. B. DuBois called for more Black theatrical productions to counteract the propaganda of the 1915 white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation. Rachel dealt with the epidemic of lynching that was sweeping the country and justified by the film. The NAACP produced the first staging of the play in Washington, D.C. The playbill for the production described Rachel as “race propaganda” designed to “enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the ten million colored citizens in this free Republic.”

“Angelina wanted her play to inform white Americans about the harsh reality of being Black in America.”

In the play, Rachel is a young Black woman living in a Northern city who is forced to reckon with the horrors of racism when she learns that her father and brother were victims of lynching. The play also explores issues related to the Great Migration and Black motherhood. When it premiered, Rachel created a great deal of controversy. Some Black critics believed it was too dark and left Black audiences with no sense of hope. Angelina responded by writing an article in which she explained that she did not intend to make Black audiences feel despair. She wanted her play to inform white Americans about the harsh reality of being Black in the US. 

But other Black Americans thought Rachel was a vital piece of activist theater. The play was staged again in New York City in 1917 with the support of several female members of the NAACP. It was published in 1920. Today, Rachel is recognized as the first drama written by a Black author for Black performers that specifically targeted a white audience.

After the success of Rachel, Angelina continued to write. She wrote a second play that was never published, as well as short stories and poems. One of her more successful short stories, “The Closing Door,” was published in 1919. “The Closing Door” tackled the difficult topics of lynching and infanticide. Angelina found more widespread success with her romantic poetry, which was published in many of the prominent poetry anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance.

Many of Angelina’s romantic poems feature women as the object of desire. These, together with allusions in her journals and letters, have led some historians to speculate that Angelica was a lesbian or bisexual. Some even believe Archibald was aware of Angelina’s sexuality and strongly disapproved of it, which led Angelina to try to suppress her desires. Whatever the truth, Angelina never married or had a long-term romantic relationship. 

When Archibald fell ill in 1928 Angelina retired from teaching to take care of him full time. He passed away in 1930 and Angelina gave up writing around the same time. She moved to New York City, where she retreated from the public sphere and lived quietly and reclusively for the rest of her life. 

Angelina passed away in 1958. Historians now consider her one of the trailblazing writers that kicked off the Harlem Renaissance. Rachel is still studied and staged today. 

Vocabulary

  • abolitionist: An activist who worked to outlaw the practice of slavery in the US.
  • Great Migration: A period in US history when half a million Black Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North. 
  • Harlem Renaissance: An artistic movement marked by an outpouring of Black American creativity centered in the neighborhood of Harlem in NYC that lasted from the 1910s to the 1920s. 
  • infanticide: The murder of babies.
  • lynching: The extralegal execution of a person by a mob.
  • white supremacy: A racist belief that white people are superior to people of all other races.

Discussion Questions

  • How did Angelina Weld Grimké use creative writing as a form of political activism? Do you think her work was effective? Why or why not?
  • Angelina Weld Grimké was born into a family with a long history of activism. How do you think this influenced her life and the work she went on to do?
  • How do you think Angelina Weld Grimké’s work was influenced by the conditions of the times in which she lived? How might her work (and life) have been different if she lived in another era in US history?

Suggested Activities

Themes

POLITICS AND SOCIETY; ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Source Notes

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