Grimké, Angelina Weld, 1880-1958

Angelina Weld Grimké; Born February 27, 1880, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Died June 10, 1958 (aged 78), New York City, USA; journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first American women of color to have a play publicly performed; Her father, Archibald Grimké, was a lawyer and of mixed race, son of a white slave owner and an enslaved mixed-race woman of color. He was the second African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was European American, from a Midwestern middle-class family; Angelina was named for her father's paternal white aunt Angelina Grimké Weld, who with her sister Sarah Grimké had brought him and his brothers into her family after learning about them after his father's death; Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, the newspaper of the NAACP, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois; and Opportunity. They were also collected in anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. Her more well-known poems include "The Eyes of My Regret", "At April", "Trees" and "The Closing Door". While living in Washington, DC, she was included among the figures of the Harlem Renaissance, as her work was published in its journals and she became connected to figures in its circle. Some critics place her in the period before the Renaissance. During that time, she counted the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson as one of her friends; Grimké wrote Rachel – originally titled Blessed Are the Barren – one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence;