small Negro theater companies and called for
“inner freedom” for Negro dramatists and plays.
The editors challenged the social expectations and
generic limitations that confronted African Ameri-
cans. The most promising solution for African-
American development, argued Locke, lay in the
“folk play,” a “rare” form whose value lay in its
“deep spiritual penetration into the heart and spirit
of Negro life.”
Throughout his career, Gregory articulated
provocative philosophies about American theater
and the African-American dramatic tradition. In
1915 he considered the vital link between racial
uplift and artistic achievement in The Citizen,a
Boston-based journal on whose editorial board he
served with poet and writer WILLIAMSTANLEY
BRAITHWAITE. In 1927 his essay entitled “A
Chronology of the Negro Theatre” concluded Plays
of Negro Life,his coedited volume with Locke. In
his assessment of African-American dramatic his-
tory, Gregory celebrated the visibility of African-
American drama and the fact that it was “now
recognized as an important factor in the develop-
ment of a native American drama.” He offered an
absorbing retrospective account of the black pres-
ence in American theater and celebrated the ac-
complishments of white and African American
dramatists and writers alike. He praised the Hap-
good Players, the group founded by theater patron
and philanthropist EMILIEHAPGOOD, the 1913 his-
torical pageant entitled The Star of Ethiopiathat W.
E. B. DUBOISwrote and produced, and called at-
tention to his March 1916 collaborative triumph
with the NAACP Drama Committee when they
staged Grimké’s Rachel.He concluded on a note of
hard-won satisfaction, pleased that “The New York
stage, at least, has evidently come to the point
where the Negro play is no longer the season’s nov-
elty or exception, but quite on the other hand one
of the characteristic features of the developing
drama of native themes and manufacture.”
T. Montgomery Gregory resigned from
Howard University in 1924 to become supervisor
of Negro Schools in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He
continued to advocate the power and importance
of African-American dramatic contributions until
his retirement in 1956. He was struck down by
leukemia and passed away in Washington, D.C., on
21 November 1971.
Bibliography
Frontline: “Secret Daughter.” PBS. Available online. URL:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/
secret/. Accessed May 20, 2005.
Gregory, Montgomery. “The Drama of Negro Life.” In
The New Negro,edited by Alain Locke. 1925,
reprint, New York: Athenaeum, 1968.
Sollors, Werner, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas Under-
wood. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of
African-American Experience at Harvard and Rad-
cliffe.New York: New York University Press, 1993.Grimké, Angelina Emily Weld(1880–1958)
A Bostonian, poet, dramatist, writer, and teacher
whose namesake was her paternal great-aunt An-
gelina Grimké, one of two ardent white abolitionist
sisters from South Carolina. Grimké produced stir-
ring dramas and short fiction that underscored the
violence and devastation of LYNCHING. Her literary
activism, for which she is best known, was in-
formed by her family’s documented history of abo-
litionist protest and public service.
Born in BOSTONin February 1880 to ARCHI-
BALDGRIMKÉand Sarah Stanley Grimké, Angelina
benefited from her father’s active participation in
prominent Boston legal, social, and political circles.
Her aunts Angelina and Sarah Grimké sought out
Archibald and his brother Francis when the sisters
discovered that the children were the illegitimate
mixed-race offspring of their slaveholding brother
Henry. The sisters, whose antislavery work
prompted their family to disinherit them, supported
the education of the two boys. Archibald, a gradu-
ate of LINCOLNUNIVERSITY, graduated from HAR-
VARDUNIVERSITYLaw School in 1874. He was a
respected attorney, American consul to Santo-
Domingo, activist, editor, and writer whose biogra-
phies of Boston abolitionists William Lloyd
Garrison and Charles Sumner were highly regarded.
Before his death in 1930, Grimké won the SPIN-
GARNMEDAL for his lifelong efforts to protect
African-American rights. Angelina’s uncle Francis
pursued a career in the ministry and married Char-
lotte Forten, the PHILADELPHIA-born teacher who
worked closely with post–Civil War freed peoples in
the South Carolina Sea Islands. Charlotte Forten
Grimké also distinguished herself in Salem, Mas-
sachusetts, where she was the city’s first African-
American teacher of white pupils.Grimké, Angelina Emily Weld 203