Grimké, Angelina Weld

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GrimkÉ, Angelina Weld

February 27, 1880
June 10, 1958

The poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston, the daughter of Archibald Grimké and Sarah Stanley Grimké. She attended integrated schools in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1902 from Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, later part of Wellesley College. Grimké worked as a teacher in Washington, D.C., from that time until her retirement in 1926. In 1930, she moved to Brooklyn, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Grimké's best-known work is a short play entitled Rachel, first presented in 1916 and published in book form in 1920. The play portrays a young African-American woman who is filled with despair and, despite her love of children, despondently resolves not to bring any of her own into the world. With its tragic view of race relations, Rachel was staged several times by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a response to D. W. Griffith's racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

But Grimké's most influential work was her poetry. Publishing first as a teenager, she initially wrote in the sentimental style of late-nineteenth-century popular poetry. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, she began to display an interest in experimentation, both formal and thematic. She openly took up sexual themes, with a frankness that was not common among African-American poets of her time. Only occasionally addressing racial issues, she nevertheless did so with a militance and subjectivity that looked toward the Harlem Renaissance. Although she was not to be a major figure in that movement, such work did much to contribute its foundations.

(Angelina Weld Grimké should not be confused with the nineteenth-century abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld, though they were related. The former's father was the nephew of the latter.)