Angelina Weld Grimké

Angelina Weld Grimké

Angelina Weld Grimké (born February 27, 1880 in Boston , † June 10, 1958 in New York City ) was an American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet. She is considered a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance and is one of the first African American women whose plays were performed publicly.

Family background

Grimké was born in Boston in 1880, the only child to a wealthy and educated family. Her father, Archibald Grimké , was a lawyer and the second dark-skinned student to graduate from Harvard Law School . Her mother, Sarah Eliza Stanley, came from a white, middle-class Midwestern family . Grimké's parents met in Boston, where the father ran a law firm, and soon married against fierce opposition from their parents. The marriage did not last long, however: shortly after Angelina's birth, the mother separated from the father and returned with the child to their home country. When Sarah Stanley started working, she sent Angelina back to her father in Boston at the age of seven. Angelina Grimké had little contact with her mother, who committed suicide in 1898.

Grimké was made aware of the rights of women and blacks in the United States early on, as many members of her family were involved here. Her paternal great aunts Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Moore Grimké were activists who campaigned for the abolition of slavery and demanded women's rights. Her uncle Francis James Grimké was a member of the Niagara Movement and a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His wife Charlotte Forten Grimké was also involved in the anti-slavery movement and was a poet.

education

Grimké in a 1923 publication

As one of the few black women of her time, Grimké received a good education. She attended elementary schools in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Boston. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Angelina lived with her uncle Francis in Washington, DC and attended school there because her father worked as an honorary consul in the Dominican Republic between 1894 and 1898 . She then attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which later became part of Wellesley College as the Department of Hygiene , and graduated from there as a physical education teacher . After graduation, she and her father moved entirely to Washington.

Teaching

From 1902 Grimké worked first as a sports teacher, then as an English teacher at the Armstrong Manual Training School. In 1916 she moved to Dunbar High School . Here she taught, among others, May Miller , who influenced her and encouraged her to write. During the summer she often attended literature classes at Harvard University .

In July 1911 Grimké was the victim of a train accident, which from then on severely impaired her health and led to constant back pain. Nevertheless, she cared for her father when he fell ill in 1928. After his death in 1930, Grimké, who had retired as a teacher in 1926, moved to New York City. She lived in seclusion in Brooklyn until her death in 1958 .

plant

The first poems and short stories were written as early as the 1890s. As early as 1893, The Grave in the Corner was a first poem published in the Norfolk County Gazette. In the following years her poems appeared in the Boston Transcript , including El Beso, one of her most important works.

Grimké wrote essays, short stories, and poems that were published in The Crisis , the NAACP newspaper, and Opportunity , and can also be found in some Harlem Renaissance anthologies . While she lived in Washington, she came into contact with members of the Harlem Renaissance, in particular with the writer Georgia Douglas Johnson , she soon became close friends.

Rachel

Grimké had already written her most important work Rachel in 1916 - one of the first pieces to address racially motivated violence. She had written the three-act act at the request of the NAACP to protest against the film The Birth of a Nation (1915) by David Wark Griffith , because it glorified the Ku Klux Klan and a racist view of blacks and their role in the Civil War and spread during the reintegration of the southern states .

Rachel portrayed an African American family in the north in the early 20th century. The framework story is a lynching . The focus is on young Rachel and her family history: Her father and half-brother George were murdered in the southern states. The mother then goes to the northern states with her children Rachel and Tom, but here too they encounter everyday racism. Family members and their friends experience this very differently and deal with it very differently, from militant protest to defeatism . Rachel is initially inspired by getting married and having children, but when she learns of the terrible family history, she decides that it is irresponsible to put children in such a cruel world.

The play was premiered on March 3, 1916 in Washington and then shown in New York and Cambridge . It was published in 1920, but initially received little attention. In the meantime, however, it has paved the way for the “Harlem Renaissance” and as the first expression of the African roots of the African American people. The NAACP wrote about the premiere:

"This is the first attempt to use the stage to educate Americans about the deplorable condition of 20 million colored people in this free state."

With Mara yet another play, in which a young African American woman begins in the southern states in 1900 having an affair with a white man came. Unlike Rachel , however , Mara was neither performed nor published during the writer's lifetime.

Poetry

In the 1920s, Grimké turned more and more to poetry and published it primarily in Opportunity , the magazine of the National Urban League civil rights movement . During this time, her poems were also included in anthologies on African American literature and poetry, such as The New Negro (1925) by Alain LeRoy Locke , Caroling Dusk (1927) by Countee Cullen, and Ebony and Topaz by Charles S. Johnson . Her poems are rarely political and often celebrate the beauty of nature or love. With Dusk Dreams , Grimké planned a book with his own poems in the late 1920s, but it never appeared. In the 1930s she stopped writing altogether and increasingly withdrew.

Interpretations of their personality

Time and again, critics and literary scholars believe that Grimké's works can identify homosexuality or bisexuality. Some see this subtly hinted at in their poems. The Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance writes: “In several poems and in her diaries, Grimké describes her disappointment resulting from her homosexuality; unfulfilled yearnings are a common theme in her poetry. ”In some of her unpublished poems, she suggested that she led a life of repressions,“ personally and artistically ”.

reception

The author was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Angelina Weld Grimké and her great-aunt Sarah Moore Grimké are the main characters in Ain Gordon's play If She Stood (2013).

literature

• Gloria T. Hull: Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance . Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1987, pp. 107-154
• Ann Allen Shockley: Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide . Meridian Books, New Haven, 1989, ISBN 0-452-00981-2
• Bernard L. Peterson, Jr .: Early Black American Playwrights & Dramatic Writers . Greenwood Press, New York, 1990
• Cheryl A. Wall: Women of the Harlem Renaissance , Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1995
• Carol Sears Bots Under the Days: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké , in Barbara Smith (Ed.): Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2000
• Ymitri Jayasundera: Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958). In: Emmanuel S. Nelson: African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook , Greenwood, Westport, 2000
• Mark Perry: Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders . Viking Penguin, New York, 2002, ISBN 978-0-14-200103-5
• Charles Wilbanks (Ed.): Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimké, 1828-1835 . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2003
• Henry Louis Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Eds.): African American Lives . Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2004, pp. 358-360
• Koritha A. Mitchell: Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama. In: Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard: Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture . New York University Press, New York, 2006
• Alison M. Parker: Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State , Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, 2010
• Roberts, Brian Russell: Metonymies of Absence and Presence: Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel . In: Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era . University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2013, ISBN 978-0813933689

Web links

Commons : Angelina Weld Grimké  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• "Angelina Weld Grimke," Modern American Poetry Profile, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Black Heritage Commemorative Society biography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wellesley College: Annual Reports [of] President and Treasurer , 1917, p. 4.
2. ^ ^{A b} Henry Louis Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (ed.): African American Lives . Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2004
3. ↑ Perry (2000), pp. 341-342
4. ^ Angelina Weld Grimke - The Black Renaissance in Washington, DC. Retrieved February 27, 2020 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b} Perry (2000), p. 338
6. ↑ Paul P. Reuben: Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958) ( Memento November 26, 2003 in the Internet Archive ), PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide, accessed March 10, 2014
7. ^ Gloria T. Hull: Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance . Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1987, pp. 135-137
8. ^ ^{A b} Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance . Volume 50, 1986.
9. ^ Salisbury, Stephen. "Painted Bride productions on 19th century women touch familiar issues" , Philadelphia Inquirer , April 26, 2013 (English)