Rachel Angelina Weld Grimké(1916)
A sobering feminist play about LYNCHING, racism,
and African-American domesticity by ANGELINA
WELD GRIMKÉ. The play’s production history,
though limited, is important to note. The play is
the earliest known 20th-century play to be per-
formed publicly with an all-African-American cast.
Grimké, who wrote the play in response to a call
from the NATIONALASSOCIATION FOR THEAD-
VANCEMENT OFCOLOREDPEOPLE(NAACP) for
race plays, saw it performed under the auspices of
that organization. It debuted in Washington, D.C.,
at the Myrtilla Miner School. Two subsequent pro-
ductions were staged in New York City at the
Neighborhood Theatre on April 26, 1917, and in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1917. The play
was published for the first time four years later, in
1920.
Rachel is a three-act play that explores
African-American middle-class life and family val-
ues in the North. Grimké takes great pains to doc-
ument the material signs of the Lovings’
respectability. The meticulous stage directions
that precede Act One reveal the playwright’s de-
termination to dispel stereotypes about African-
American domesticity. As the play opens, Mrs.
Loving, a seamstress hard at work before her
sewing machine, is ensconced in a “room scrupu-
lously neat and clean and plainly furnished.” In-
cluded in the numerous items that suggest the
family’s stability, religiosity, and worth are “white
sash curtains,” a “bookcase full of books,” “a sim-
ply framed, inexpensive copy of Millet’s ‘The
Reapers,’” a copy of Burne-Jones’s “Golden
Stairs,” matched vases on the mantelpiece, and a
piano above which hangs a copy of the “Sistine
Madonna” by Raphael. Tragically, however, none
of these items offers any protection from the prej-
udice and racial intolerance. The Lovings, while
clearly nurtured in their own home, are unable to
avoid the uncivilized masses that taunt the
African-American children of the apartment
building in school or those who reject Tom Lov-
ing’s job applications because of his race.
The family’s experience of mob violence is
withheld from the second generation of Lovings.
Eventually, the widowed Mrs. Loving reveals that
her husband and the children’s father and brother
were lynched. The two men were murdered be-
cause they dared to protest the lynching of an inno-
cent man. The Loving children endure a painful,
private coming of age when they learn that they
were asleep while their father and stepbrother were
lynched. Their father was an outspoken journalist
whose “daring” articles were reminiscent of those
written by pioneering antilynching journalist IDAB.
WELLS-BARNETT. Eventually, he receives an intim-
idating message from outraged whites that calls for
him to retract an especially insistent piece written
to protest the lynching of an innocent man. He re-
fuses and a short time later is taken forcefully from
his home and family. His wife’s son George at-
tempts to defend his father but is murdered by the
mob as well. Once Rachel hears this awful story,
she makes an almost immediate connection be-
tween racial violence and maternal anguish. She
recognizes her mother’s double loss and, as Act
One closes, Rachel suggests that “this nation—this438