Angelina's paternal grandfather was Henry Grimké, of a large and wealthy slaveholding family based in Charleston, South Carolina.

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.

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.

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[2] to 1897.

"[4] Angelina Grimké attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which later became the Department of Hygiene of Wellesley College.

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.

Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, the newspaper of the NAACP, edited by W. E. B.

Grimké wrote Rachel – originally titled Blessed Are the Barren,[7] one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence.

[8] The three-act drama was written for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which called for new works to rally public opinion against D. W. Griffith's recently released film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed a racist view of blacks and of their role in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era in the South.

[7] The NAACP said of the play: "This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relating to the lamentable condition of ten millions of Colored citizens in this free republic."

Rachel develops as she changes her perceptions of what the role of a mother might be, based on her sense of the importance of a naivete towards the terrible truths of the world around her.

How my brain whirls how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of these two words, 'my wife'"[12]Two years earlier, in 1903, Grimké and her father had a falling out when she told him that she was in love.

Grimké family biographer Mark Perry speculates that the person involved may have been female, and that Archibald may already have been aware of Angelina's sexual leaning.

[12] Analysis of her work by modern literary critics has provided strong evidence that Grimké was a lesbian or bisexual.