Angelina Weld Grimke
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Angelina Weld Grimke (February 27, 1880 – June 10, 1958) was a prominent journalist and poet. Her father, Archibald Grimke, a lawyer, graduated from Harvard Law School and served as Vice-President of the NAACP.
She was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a biracial family whose members included both slaveowners and abolitionists. She was related to Reverend John Grimke Drayton of Magnolia Plantation. Angelina attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and after graduating, she moved to Washington, DC with her father. She got a job teaching English at Armstrong Manual Training school in 1902, which she left in 1916, to teach at Dunbar High School. In addition, she now spent her summers as a student of Harvard.
She 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 during the Harlem Renaissance. She also wrote a play called Rachel. A three-act drama, it was written for the NAACP as an attempt to rally support against the recently released film Birth of a Nation. It was produced in Washington, DC, acted by an all-black cast, and is considered one of the first plays to be treated in this manner.