Angelina Weld Grimké
Educator, Playwright, Activist
1880-1958
Years:
Affiliations:
Dunbar High School
Boston, Washington DC, New York
Locations:
Connections:
May Miller, Angelina Weld Grimke, Mary Burrill
Angelina Weld Grimké, a biracial woman, was born in Boston in 1880 to an activist family. She lived with her aunt and uncle in Washington DC during high school and attended Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. In 1916, she accepted a teaching position at the Dunbar High School for Black students, renowned for its academic excellence. She taught and inspired many playwrights and theatre education practitioners including poet and playwright May Miller. Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis and Opportunity, and was well known for her play RACHEL. Her work is considered to have helped set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance.
Among Grimké's most well-known works is the play RACHEL, published in 1920 in response to NAACP founder W.E.B. Dubois's call for the creation of theater by and for Black people. The play tells the story of a young Black woman who decides she will not bring children into a world plagued by racism. According to historian Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, it was the first play in the US written by a Black woman to become a "fully staged professional production." Produced in 1916 in Washington, D.C., and subsequently in New York City, Rachel was performed by an all-black cast. The NAACP said of the play: "This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relating to the lamentable condition of ten millions of Colored citizens in this free republic."
See here for a podcast regarding RACHEL.
Analysis of her work by modern literary critics has provided strong evidence that Grimké was a lesbian or bisexual. See connection to Mary Burrill.
Additional sources:
Seen in: Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 by B. Peterson, Jr. (pg 105).
