Angelina Emily Grimk (1805–1879) was an abolitionist and suffragette. Angelina was born in Charleston, South Carolina to a aristocratic Episcopalian judge who owned slaves. She was very close to her sister Sarah Moore Grimk . Despite the influence of their father, both sisters became abolitionists, and after converting to the Quaker faith, they joined Society of Friends. In 1835, Angelina wrote an anti-slavery letter to Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, who published it in, The Liberator. In 1836, after Angelina published An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, she and her sister were threatened with arrest in South Carolina. So, they moved to New York where they spoke at abolitionist meetings. In 1837, Angelina was invited to be the first woman to speak at the Massachusetts State Legislature. In 1838, she married the famous abolitionist, Theodore Dwight Weld.
Although Angelina Weld Grimké's writings appeared in many leading publications of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927), and Charles S. Johnson's Ebony and Topaz (1927), she was not a highly visible member of the literary movement, perhaps because of her retiring personality.
Named for her white great-aunt, AngelinaGrimké Weld, the famous abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, young Angelina was reared by her devoted but demanding father, Archibald Grimké, the son of Charleston aristocrat Henry Grimké, and his slave, Nancy Weston.
Angelina's white mother, Sarah Stanley Grimké, separated from her father in Angelina's early childhood, presumably because of mental and physical illness.
Slaves worked as nursemaids to the Grimkés' fourteen children and, in addition, each child was assigned a "constant companion," a slave child of about the same age who catered to his or her needs.
With their father deceased and the Grimké sons married or off at school, Angelina was left to look out for her mother and sisters and manage daily operations of the cotton plantation.
Angelina's letter was reprinted in all the major reform newspapers of the day and was printed with Garrison's Appeal to the Citizens of Boston and the Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem Stanzas for the Time in a widely circulated pamphlet.
Feeds |
Contact