Literary Birthday – 27 February – Angelina Weld Grimké

Angelina Weld Grimké was born 27 February 1880, and died 10 June 1958.

Angelina Weld Grimké Quotes

1. The South has incorporated slavery into religion; that is the most fearful thing in this rebellion. They are fighting, verily believing that they are doing God service.
2. I recognise no rights but human rights.
3. I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for.
4. Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the coloured man’s wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.
5. Can you not see that women could do and would do a hundred times more for the slave, if she were not fettered?
6. I am a mystery to myself.
7. I trust the time is coming, when the occupation of an instructor to children will be deemed the most honourable of human employment.

Angelina Weld Grimké was an African-American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet. Part of the Harlem Renaissance, she was one of the first African-American women to have a play publicly performed. She wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. Grimké is best known for her small body of poetry, which has been anthologized in Negro Poets and Their Poems, The Poetry of the Negro, and Caroling Dusk, among others.

by Amanda Patterson

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