Angelina Weld Grimké was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, in 1880 to a biracial family. Her father,
Archibald Grimké, was a lawyer and of mixed race, son of a white slave owner and a mixed-race enslaved woman of color his father owned; he was of the "negro race" according to the society he grew up in. He was the second African American to graduate from
Harvard Law School. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was European American, from a Midwestern middle-class family. Information about her is scarce. Grimké's parents met in Boston, where her father had established a law practice. Angelina was named after her father's paternal white aunt
Angelina Grimké Weld, who, along with her sister
Sarah Grimké, had brought him and his two brothers (
Francis and John) into her family after learning about them after his father's death. (They were the sons of her late slave-owning brother Henry, also one of the wealthy white Grimké planter family.) When Grimké and Sarah Stanley married, they faced strong opposition from her family, due to concerns over race. The marriage did not last very long. Soon after their daughter Angelina's birth, Sarah left Archibald and returned with the infant to the Midwest. After Sarah began a career of her own, she sent Angelina, then seven, back to Massachusetts to live with her father. Angelina Grimké would have little to no contact with her mother after that. Sarah Stanley committed
suicide several years later. Angelina's paternal grandfather was Henry Grimké, of a large and wealthy slaveholding family based in
Charleston, South Carolina. Her paternal grandmother was Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman whom Henry owned; she was also of
mixed race. Henry became involved with her as a widower. They lived together and had three sons:
Archibald,
Francis, and John (born after his father's death in 1852). Henry taught Nancy and the boys to read and write but kept them enslaved. Among Henry's family were two sisters who had opposed slavery and left the South before he began his relationship with Weston;
Sarah and Angelina Grimké became notable abolitionists in the North. The Grimkés were also related to John Grimké Drayton of
Magnolia Plantation near
Charleston, South Carolina. South Carolina had laws making it difficult for an individual to manumit slaves, even his own slave children. (See
Children of the plantation.) Instead of trying to gain the necessary legislative approval required for each manumission, wealthy fathers often sent their children north for schooling to give them opportunities, and in hopes they would stay to live in a free state. Angelina's uncle,
Francis J. Grimké, graduated from
Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and
Princeton Theological Seminary. He became a
Presbyterian minister in Washington, D.C. He married
Charlotte Forten, from a prominent and abolitionist family of color in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She became known as an abolitionist and diarist. From the ages of 14 to 18, Angelina lived with her aunt and uncle, Charlotte and Francis, in Washington, D.C., and attended school there before enrolling in the preparatory academy attached to
Carleton College in
Northfield, Minnesota from 1895 to 1897. During this period, her father was serving as U.S.
consul (1894 and 1898) to the
Dominican Republic. Indicating the significance of her father's consulship in her life, Angelina later recalled, "it was thought best not to take me down to [Santo Domingo] but so often and so vivid have I had the scene and life described that I seem to have been there too." Angelina Grimké attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which later became the Department of Hygiene of
Wellesley College. After graduating, she and her father moved to Washington, D.C., to be with his brother Francis and family. In 1902, Grimké began teaching English at the
Armstrong Manual Training School, a black school in the segregated system of the capital. In 1916 she moved to a teaching position at the
Dunbar High School for black students, renowned for its academic excellence. One of her pupils was the future poet and playwright
May Miller. During the summers, Grimké frequently took classes at
Harvard University, where her father had attended
law school. On July 11, 1911, Grimké was a passenger in a train wreck at Bridgeport, Connecticut, which she survived with a back injury that never fully healed. After her father took ill in 1928, she tended to him until his death in 1930. Afterward, she left Washington, D.C., for New York City. She lived a quiet retirement as a semi-recluse in an apartment on the Upper West Side. She died in 1958. ==Literary career==