- Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958) was a gifted poet, dramatist, and teacher. She was born in Boston to a former slave father and a white Bostonian mother. Although primarily reared by her father, Grimke was also influenced by her famed abolitionist-feminist aunts, Sarah M. Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld. After graduating from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1902, Grimke began a long teaching career in Washington, D.C. She became a regular member of the African American artistic circle that gathered around Georgia Douglas Johnson. In the 1920s, Grimke’s poems began appearing in Opportunity and The Crisis. Her work also appeared in several Harlem Page 428 →Renaissance anthologies, including Alain Locke’s 1925 collection The New Negro. Grimke’s poetry tended to avoid racial subjects, but her three-act play, Rachel, was an angry and painful drama about the personal impact of lynching. The vast majority of Grimke’s poetry remained unpublished during her lifetime, perhaps because of its explicit “woman-identified” voice.
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