Angelina Grimké

Who was Angelina Grimké?

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. While she was raised a southerner, she spent her entire adult life living in the North. The time of her greatest fame was between 1836, when a letter she sent to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a courageous and brilliant speech to abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia, with a hostile crowd throwing stones and shouting outside the hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that two-year period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women's rights.

Drawing her views from natural rights theory, the Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own experience of slavery and racism in the South, she argued for the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman, and was particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice.