Angelina Weld Grimke Early Childhood Home

Temple Street, site of Angelina Weld Grimke's childhood home

NPS Photo/M Mark

Quick Facts

Location:

61 Temple Street

Significance:

Early childhood home of Angelina Weld Grimke

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private Residence

Born into a biracial family in 1880, the poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke lived her earliest years at 61 Temple Street, in a neighborhood long known as a hotbed of Black activism.¹ She came from a family of prominent activists and thinkers. Her father Archibald had escaped slavery and became a lawyer and leading civil rights leader in Boston, and beyond. Marrying Sarah Stanley, a white woman, they moved here to Temple Street to have an apartment of their own where they could raise Angelina. Her great aunts, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, dedicated themselves to the abolition and suffragist movements. In keeping with the legacy of her activist family, Grimke wrote poems, plays, short stories, and articles that often focused on the pressing issues of race and discrimination. A key theme in her work is unrequited love, engaging in Romantic Friendships as a young adult, Weld swore off any romantic relationships.²

---

Footnotes

1. Boston City Directory, 1881, states 61 Temple Street.
2. Kerri K. Greenidge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023): 306.