Flashback Friday Remember’s Angelina Weld Grimké

February 28, 2025
HANK ORSO

I know, I know, yer boy Hank here usually is writing about the men folks over here at Fleshbot Gay. But hey, I'm old and "gay" in my mind really includes everyone. So to close out this Black History Month let's remember Harlem Renaissance-era activist, writer and teacher Angelina Weld Grimké.

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Grimké, born on Feb 27th in 1880 (died June 10, 1958), was an American Black journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet who came to some fame during the Harlem Renaissance. Although mostly closeted during her lifetime, it's from more recent analysis of her private letters, diaries, and unpublished poems where the more explicitly lesbian and bisexual nature and nuance of her work comes forth. She is one of the first women of color to have a play publicly produced.

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Born to a mixed-race father and white mother in Boston, her early childhood was tempestuous. Her father, the second Black man to graduate from Harvard, and his wife Sarah separated, and young Angelina went with her mother to the Midwest. She was returned to her father at the age of seven, after which her mother committed suicide. She was a successful student and became a school teacher in the DC area, living there until her father's death in 1930. After which, Angelina relocated to NY's Upper West Side where she lived in relative seclusion until her death in 1958.

Her poems and short stories, some of which predate the Renaissance, dealt with the theme of motherhood, a subject she felt called out to white women as a unifying bond. Her first play, Rachel, was written for the NAACP when it put a call out for submissions in response to DW Griffith's racist, pro-Klan film Birth of a Nation. Produced in DC and NYC in 1916, it centered on a northern Black family's response to a lynching. Reaction to the play was positive, with the NAACP claiming: "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." Such a terrible event is also the center of a second play, Mara, as well as a short story, "Goldi," based on an actual 1918 lynching of a pregnant woman, Mary Turner, in Georgia.

Concerning Grimké's sexuality, The Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance states: "In several poems and in her diaries Grimké expressed the frustration that her lesbianism created; thwarted longing is a theme in several poems." Grimké once wrote to a friend, "I know you are too young now to become my wife, but I hope, darling, that in a few years you will come to me and be my love, my wife! How my brain whirls how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of these two words, 'my wife.'" She was 16.