Angelina Weld Grimké

• Born: February 27, 1880
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: June 10, 1958
• Place of death: Brooklyn, New York

Writer

Although much of her work went unpublished during her lifetime and even after her death, Grimké made a significant contribution not only to African American literature but also to American literature in general. Her play Rachel(1916) heralded the creation of a genre of serious African American drama.

Areas of achievement: Gay and lesbian issues; Literature; Poetry; Theater

Early Life

Angelina Emily Weld Grimké (GRIHM-kee) was born on February 27, 1880, in Boston, Massachusetts; she was an only child. Her father was Archibald Henry Grimké, a successful lawyer, politician, and journalist. Her mother was Sarah Stanley Weld, a writer. Grimké was named for her great-aunt Angelina Grimké Weld, a prominent abolitionist who had helped her father when he was attending the law school at Harvard University. The family was biracial: Grimké’s father, the son of a white southerner and his African American slave/mistress Nancy Weston, was a mulatto; her mother was from a middle-class white family. Because of the strong opposition of her parents to the marriage, Grimké’s mother left her husband, taking her daughter with her in 1883. Four years later, Grimké’s mother sent her back to her father. In 1890, Archibald Grimké was appointed consul to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Grimké lived with her uncle Francis Grimké and his wife during the four years that her father was in the Dominican Republic. Upon his return, she once again lived with him.

Grimké began writing very early, possibly influenced by her father, who wrote for newspapers and journals as an advocate of suffrage for women and for African Americans. Grimké’s mother never reappeared in her life, and she became very attached to her father. Her father’s influence and her relationship with him became an important factor in both her personal and her creative life.

Light skinned and from a prominent family, Grimké spent her childhood in a social and economic situation far removed from that which she would later depict in her writings. She received her elementary and secondary education at Fairmont Grammar School, Carleton Academy, Cushing Academy, and Girls’ Latin School. Based on letters found among Grimké’s personal papers, it is believed that by the time she was fourteen, she had discovered her homosexuality. In 1896, she was apparently involved in a love affair with Mary (Mamie) Burrill.

Upon graduation from secondary school, Grimké enrolled at Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (Wellesley College), where she completed a degree in physical education in 1902. After graduation, she moved with her father to Washington, D.C., where she taught physical education classes and then English at Armstrong Manual Training School. From 1906 to 1910, she studied English during the summers at Harvard University, her father’s alma mater. In 1916, she became a teacher at M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School).

Life’s Work

Although most of Grimké’s work was not published during her life, she was a prolific writer who worked mainly in poetry, fiction, and drama. She also wrote some journalistic pieces. Grimké wrote approximately two hundred poems—of which she published thirty-one—some fifteen short stories, and two plays: Rachel (1916) and the unfinished Mara. Grimké wrote the majority of her works from 1900 to 1920. Much of her published work appeared in either The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), or in Opportunity, the publication of the National Urban League. The poems “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké” (1915) and “To the Dunbar High School” (1917) were among works published in The Crisis. In Opportunity, she published several poems, including “The Black Finger” (1923) and “Death” (1925), and the nonfiction prose piece about her father A Biographical Sketch of Archibald H. Grimké (1925).

Grimké’s work also was published in Colored American Magazine (“Black Is, as Black Does,” 1901), Pilot (“Beware Lest He Awakes,” 1902), and The Birth Control Review (The Closing Door, 1919; Goldie, 1920). Her work appeared in newspapers as well. In 1893 and 1894, while she was still in her teens, she published two poems in The Norfolk County Gazette, “To Theodore D. Weld—On His Ninetieth Birthday” (1893) and “The Grave in the Corner” (1894). The poems “Longing” (1901), “May” (1901), “To Joseph Lee” (1908), and “El Beso” (1909) were published in The Boston Evening Transcript.

Although Grimké was not a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, she is viewed as a precursor to the movement and recognized by the Harlem Renaissance writers as having contributed significantly to the body of African American literature. During the 1920’s, when the Harlem Renaissance was at its strongest, several of her poems were included in two anthologies, Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) and Countée Cullen’s Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927). The play Rachel, published in 1920, was the only book Grimké published during her lifetime.

Grimké’s writing addressed controversial themes, which is probably the reason so little of it was published. Written in traditional Romantic and Victorian style, her poems express disappointment in love, loneliness, and alienation. The poems also reflect her lesbian orientation. While a few of her poems, such as “Beware Lest He Awake” and “Tenebris,” deal with racial violence and lynching, these themes are addressed more often in her drama and fiction.

Grimké retired from teaching in 1926. Two years later, her father became ill; she took care of him with the help of his brother Francis until his death in 1930. After her father’s death, Grimké lived a reclusive life in New York City. She still wrote occasionally but published nothing. She died there on June 10, 1958.

Significance

Grimké was one of the most important of the pre-Harlem Renaissance writers. Her play Rachel marked the first serious nonmusical drama written and performed by African Americans. The play also was politically and socially important, as it portrayed the hopelessness resulting from the racial injustice and violence, especially lynching, that commonly occurred in the United States in the early twentieth century. With her play, her short stories, and her poems, she contributed significantly to literature that expressed the African American female voice. Her portrayals of injustice, oppression, and their devastating effects are a forceful condemnation of racism. Grimké’s works are also significant in the canon of feminist literature, as they explore concerns of the societal, political, and sexual disenfranchisement of women in a patriarchal society.

Bibliography

Grimké, Angelina Weld. Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké. Edited by Carolivia Herron. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Herron’s introduction offers a detailed biography and analysis of the influence of Grimké’s sexuality on her poetry.

Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Extremely well-researched source written from a black feminist perspective. Primarily analyzes Grimké’s poetry.

McCaskill, Barbara, and Caroline Gebhard, eds. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature 1877-1919. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Provides a good overview of the period that led to the Harlem Renaissance. Discusses importance of play Rachel to the genres of antilynching drama and African American serious drama.

Miller, Ericka M. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Nella Larsen. New York: Garland, 2000. Discusses Grimké’s poems and short stories dealing with lynching, revenge, and African American women’s reproductive rights.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. The most comprehensive study of Grimké’s work available. Includes detailed analysis of several of Grimké’s writings, especially Rachel.