Angelina Weld Grimke" {February 27,1880-June 10,1958}

Was an mixed American journalist,teacher playwright and poet who was part of the Harlem Renaissance and was one of the first Mixed America women to have a play performed.She was born in Boston Massachusetts to a biracial family,whose ancestors included slaveholders,abolitionist,European-American slaves,and Midwesterners.Her father,Archibald Grimke was a lawyer the second mixed background man to have graduate from Harvard Law School.He was appointed consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894-1898.Her mother,Sarah Stanley,was a white woman from a Midwestern middle-class family,whose information is scarce.Her parents met in Boston.Archibald had established a law practice there after completing law school.He and Sarah married but faced opposition from her family,due to concerns over race.The marriage did not last very long.Not too after Angelia's birth,Sarah left the family and took Angelia with her to the Midwest.After Sarah began a career of her own,she sent Angelina,then seven,back to Massachusetts to live with her father.She would have have little or no contact with her mother after that.Sarah committed suicide several years later.Angelina great aunts were the famous abolitionist,Sarah and Angelina Grimke.Her paternal grandfather was their brother Henry Grimke of their large slave holding family based in Charleston,South Carolina.Her paternal grandmother was Nancy Weston,an enslaved woman,with whom Henry became involved after becoming a widower.They lived together and had three sons:Archibald Francis and John.Her uncle,Francis J. Grimke,graduated from Lincoln University,PA and Princeton Theological Seminary and became a Presbyterian minister in Washington,D.C. he married and diarist Charlotte Forten,of the prominent black abolitionist family from Philadelphia.Between 1894 and 1898,Angelia lived with her uncle and aunt in Washington,DC,while her father served as consul in the Dominican Republic.She was also related to John Drayton of Magnolia Plantation.Angelia attended the Boston Normal School  of Gymnastic (now Wellesley College). After graduating,she moved to Washington,D.C. with her father.In 1902,she began teaching English at Armstrong Manual Training school.She then left this position in 1916 to teach at the legendary Dunbar High School,where one of her pupils was the poet/playwright Mary Miller.In addition,she frequently took classes at Harvard University during the summers.Angelia wrote essays,short stories and poems which were published in the Crisis,Opportunity,The New Negro,Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems.Some of her more famous poems include,"The Eyes of My Regret,""At April and "Trees"She was an active writer and activist included among the figures of the Harlem Renaissance.She counted as one of her friends during that time the poet Georgia Douglass Johnson.She also wrote a play called Rachel,one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence.She wrote the three-act drama NAACP to rally support against the recently released film The Birth of a Nation.The play was produced in 1916  in Washington,D.C.,performed by an all-black cast.It was published in 1920."Rachel" portrays the realities of life for an African American family in the north,in the early 20th Century.Centered on the family of the title character,each role mirrors the different reactions to the racial discrimination against blacks at the time.The themes of motherhood and the innocence of children are integral pieces of what she was highlighting.The development  of Rachel herself,revolves around her changing perception of what the role of a mother might be,based on her understanding of the importance of child-like naivete towards the terrible truths of the world around them.Having the lynching act as the specter of the play,authenticates the African  American experience and successfully countering the false narrative of Griffith's "The Closing Door."After her father died,she left Washington,DC,for New York,where she lived in a reclusive life in Brooklyn.