Angela Weld Grimké and Archival Rediscovery

Rachel (ca. 1920)

Angelina Weld Grimké was born in 1880 to a white mother and half-Black father. A lesser-known writer of the Harlem Renaissance, she is most frequently remembered as the author of Rachel, “a play of protest” published in 1920 that tells the story of a young Black woman who, upon encountering the ugly reality of lynching and American racism, resolves to never bear children. Grimké also wrote poems and short stories, publishing in magazines and periodicals like the NAACP’s Crisis and Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review.  

Grimké was very private, shielding details of her life from the public sphere. When she died, a small collection of her personal papers was acquired by the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. In the late 1970s, Akasha Gloria Hull (now known as a foundational scholar of Black Women’s Studies) dove into the archive, discovering diaries, letters, and drafts of unpublished poems that explicitly revealed Grimké’s romantic and erotic relationships with women. In 1979, Hull published her research in Conditions, a lesbian magazine, uncovering Grimké as a poet whose work and life “can help answer the question: What did it mean to be a Black Lesbian/poet in America at the beginning of the twentieth century?”

The most complete collection of Grimké’s manuscripts and personal papers resides at Howard University. Beinecke Library owns just four items certain to have been handled by Grimké herself: two handwritten poetry drafts, one handwritten letter to Langston Hughes, and this handwritten letter below to Harold Jackman. Grimké begins the letter, “Please don’t be too hard on me.” In encountering this decontextualized fragment of Grimké’s archive, one can’t help but wonder: hard on her for what?

Letter from Harold Jackman to Angelina Weld Grimké, October 22, 1936

Grimké never published a book of poetry in her lifetime. Instead, many of her poems appeared in anthologies and magazines like Black and White: an Anthology of Washington Verse, displayed below. “El Beso,” Grimké’s most famous poem, erotically describes a kiss with an ungendered “you.”  In “Under the Days,” Grimke explores time’s ability to weigh down and erase the details of one’s life, asking, “Who will ever find me under the days?”

Two of Grimké's poems were featured in Black and White: an Anthology of Washington Verse (ca. 1927)

Akasha Gloria Hull’s “‘Under the Days’: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké” was published in 1979 in Conditions: Five (Black Women’s Issue). Hull broke ground for a wave of scholarship on Black women’s sexuality at the turn of the century. Examining previously unseen poetry manuscripts and diaries that explicitly referenced Grimké’s romantic relationships with women, Hull pulled Grimké out of obscurity, cementing her into the lesbian historical record.

Aché, a Black lesbian publication featured in the latter part of this exhibition, published this short biography of Grimké in 1989, explicitly crediting Hull “with resurrecting Angelina Weld Grimké and discovering her lesbianism.” In 1992, Hull turned her work into a book: Color, Sex, and Poetry, a biographical study of women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Biography of Grimké published in a 1989 issue of Aché, a Black lesbian publication

In Aphrodite’s Daughters, scholar Maureen Honey considers Grimké alongside her contemporary Mae Cowdery, a bisexual writer whose poem “My Body” is included in “The Queer Harlem Renaissance” page.

Aphrodite's Daughters (2016) explores queer sexuality in the work of three underappreciated women poets of the Harlem Renaissance: Angelina Weld Grimke, Mae Cowdery, and Gwendolyn Bennett.