Angelina Grimké came of age in Boston and
enjoyed close family relations with the family of
Theodore Weld, her great-aunt Angelina’s husband.
She had opportunities to interact with members of
Boston’s active African-American community; her
father was president of the city branch of the NA-
TIONALASSOCIATION FOR THEADVANCEMENT OF
COLOREDPEOPLE(NAACP) and later became vice
president of the organization. In 1902, after com-
pleting her early education at prestigious prepara-
tory schools, including Carleton Academy in
Northfield, Minnesota, Cushing Academy in Ash-
burnham, Massachusetts, and at the Boston Normal
School of Gymnastics, which later became the De-
partment of Hygiene at Wellesley College, Grimké
relocated to Washington, D.C., and began teaching
English in public high schools. In 1902, she began a
five-year career at Armstrong Manual Training
School before moving in 1907 to the prestigious M
Street High School, the institution that became
DUNBARHIGHSCHOOLin 1916 and counted ANNA
JULIACOOPERand JESSIEFAUSETamong its faculty.
Grimké produced much of her writing during
the Harlem Renaissance era. Her reputation as a
talented writer was confirmed on the eve of the
Renaissance. The drama committee of the
NAACP chose her lynching drama Rachel(1916)
as the piece that best exemplified successful race
plays. It was staged at the Myrtilla Miner Normal
School in Washington, D.C., and contributed
much to the intense debates about the nature and
focus of African-American writing. Grimké pub-
lished Rachelin 1920. Seven years later, the work
appeared in PLAYS OF NEGRO LIFE (1927),
coedited by NAACP member T. MONTGOMERY
GREGORYand his HOWARDUNIVERSITYcolleague
ALAINLOCKE.
Rachelfocused on the evolution of a sentimen-
tal young woman and the distressing epiphanies she
experienced as she confronted the evils of the world
around her. Ultimately, Rachel, a loving woman on
the verge of marriage and motherhood, makes
painful, isolating decisions about her own future.
She vows never to marry and declares that she has
no interest in having children who would have to
survive a world of intense racial hatred. The family,
whose deeply ironic surname is “Loving,” lives in an
unidentified Northern city. The widowed mother
Mrs. Loving and her two children, Tom and Rachel,
are grappling with the endemic racism and disen-
franchisement that undermined much African-
American progress in post–Civil War America. Mrs.
Loving discloses the tragic story of her husband’s
death at the hands of a lynch mob.
Over the course of the play, Rachel is devas-
tated by the story of her father’s death and out-
raged further by the treatment that her young
adopted son endures at school. She withdraws
from public life. She ends her engagement to a de-
voted young man and develops an emphatic and
problematic solution to racial harassment. The
young woman who once told her mother that she
“love[d] little black and brown babies best of all”
and that she “pray[ed] God every night to give
[her]... little black and brown babies to protect
and guard,” ultimately suppresses her own mater-
nal instincts as a means to preserve her sanity and
self. The play closes with Rachel’s wrenching vows
of abstinence and total self-control.
Rachelwas produced at least two more times
after its Washington, D.C., debut and included
shows at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and at the Neighborhood Play-
house in New York City. The Grimké papers also
reveal that a number of nonprofit and community
organizations solicited Grimké for the permission
to stage the play. In a letter to her father, Grimké
also made reference to a national production of
the play and an effort to secure the actor George
Gliss for a part in the play. Rachelhad a deep effect
on those who saw it. According to Grimké biogra-
pher Gloria Hull, the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick
was moved to write Grimké after she saw the work
in Cambridge. Warrick wanted the playwright to
know just “how thoroughly you reached me” and
mused about how deeply she was struck by the
play’s “bitterness,” and “underlying current of
sweetness and delicacy” (Hull, 119). In his 1927
essay on the history of African-American theater,
T. Montgomery Gregory, chair of the Howard Uni-
versity English department, recalled that the pro-
gram for the Washington, D.C., production of
Grimké’s play signaled its explicit political, rather
than artistic, agenda. It stated proudly that the
work was “... the first attempt to use the stage for
race propaganda in order to enlighten the Ameri-
can people relative to the lamentable condition of
ten millions of Colored citizens in this free repub-204 Grimké, Angelina Emily Weld