Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School

In the summer of 1883, the African American schoolteacher Lucy Ella Moten¹ sought an appointment as principal of the Myrtilla Miner Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, DC.² Despite her multiple professional degrees and her service as a teacher in the city’s public schools for several years, the board of education initially challenged her fitness for the position, claiming that Moten failed to conform to the standards of respectability necessary for such a post. Citing her gregarious lifestyle—a fondness for male company, theater, and cards—the board asserted that Moten was “far too fascinating for so responsible a position” (Corrothers 103). The would-be principal was ultimately invited to assume her post at the Miner teacher-training institution after the board’s chair, Frederick Douglass, intervened on her behalf. Douglass persuaded the board to accept Moten’s application on condition that she reform her behavior, and a compromise was struck.³ If board members were initially concerned about her commitment to respectability, their concerns could not have lasted long. Moten’s tenure at the Miner School lasted almost four decades. Over the course of her long career, Moten instituted a rigorous program of intellectual and moral improvement, and became renowned for her “puritanic self-discipline” (Corrothers 104). And yet, she also called attention to the interdependency of professional and community interests. Educational ideals, Moten insisted, must be “born from . . . experience gained by coming into actual touch with living problems” (L. E. Moten, “Report” 317). Black women’s literary contributions played a role in the principal’s—and by extension the Miner School’s—socially engaged educational credo.

This essay spotlights the relationship between the Miner School’s complicated racial uplift mission and black women’s protest literature. In March 1916 the school hosted the inaugural performance of the first black-authored anti-lynching play, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel. Sponsored by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and billed as the first attempt to use the stage to protest racist violence, the play explores the impact of lynching on black families from the perspective of black women. The plot centers on Mrs. Loving and her two grown children, Rachel and Tom, who are trying to get by in a northern American city and a society that treats black people with, as Tom puts it, “a pretense of liberality” (49). The family initially bears the hardships of racial discrimination with fortitude. While Tom seeks employment as an electrical engineer, Rachel spends her days happily daydreaming about her future life as wife and mother, a prospect on the near horizon. She indulges this desire by taking into her care a young neighborhood boy, Jimmy. But Mrs. Loving’s revelation that Rachel and Tom’s father and brother were victims of a southern lynch mob has a traumatic effect. Rachel spirals into a state of madness and, at the play’s denouement, proclaims that it is “a kindness—sometimes—to kill” black children rather than expose them to the world’s cruelty (88). This dramatic conclusion has proven perplexing for early audiences and contemporary readers alike. Indeed, it would have been particularly striking to an audience of trainee teachers at the Miner School who would soon find themselves responsible for the well-being and education of many of the city’s black children.

This essay examines Grimké’s play in relation to the Miner School and the professional-educational discourses circulating in Washington, DC, communities at the time of its initial production. Between 1890 and 1910, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes, the number of black women in the professions increased by over 200 percent (41). In these decades, women came to represent 43 percent of all black professionals, a statistic attributable to women’s gains in the field of education (Higginbotham 41). Moten emblematizes this transformation. Like other prominent black women educators—such as Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper—Moten strove to establish and maintain a position within this class of educated and upwardly mobile black women. The terms of their inclusion, as indicated above...