Archibald Henry Grimké (August 17, 1849 – February 25, 1930) was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A modern scholar speculates that the move was motivated by Henry's desire to enjoy his relationship with Nancy free from the eyes of Charleston's white community.

Henry was prohibited from freeing them by a South Carolina law passed in 1841 that did not allow for the release of enslaved people through gifts or trusts.

Beginning in the 1880s, he began to get active in politics and speaking out about the rise of white supremacy following the end of Reconstruction in the South.

Archibald supported equal rights for blacks in the papers and public lectures, which were popular in the nineteenth century.

[10] In the South, the situation for Blacks was deteriorating, and Archibald continued the struggle against racism, allying at times with other prominent leaders of the day.

He had also become involved in Frederick Douglass' National Council of Colored People, a predecessor to the NAACP, which grappled with issues of education for blacks, especially in the South.

Grimké and Trotter organized the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which at the time was a gathering of men opposed to Booker T. Washington's views.

Archibald wrote about national issues from his point of view, for instance, urging more activism and criticizing President Theodore Roosevelt for failing to adequately support black troops in Brownsville, Texas, where they were accused of starting a riot.

Continuing his interest in intellectual work, he served as president of the American Negro Academy from 1903 to 1919, which supported African-American scholars and promoted higher education for blacks.

[11] He believed that capitalism, as practiced in the United States, could help freedmen who left agriculture to achieve independence and true freedom.

[7] As president, Grimké wrote detailed accounts of local racial injustices, such as inequitable distribution of educational funds, taking direct action in his community.

Grimké led the public protest in Washington, D.C., against the segregation of federal offices under President Woodrow Wilson, who acceded to the wishes of other Southerners in his cabinet.

The organization supported the U.S. in World War I, but Grimké highlighted the racial discrimination against blacks in the military and worked to change it.

Unwilling to live in a slave society, they left the South and their family and became noted abolitionists and feminists, drawing on their first-hand knowledge of slavery's horrors.

Together known as the Grimké sisters, they were active as writers and speakers in Northern abolitionist circles, having joined the Quakers and the American Anti-Slavery Society.

In February 1868, Angelina Grimké Weld read an article in which Edwin Bower, a professor at Lincoln University near Philadelphia, compared Lincoln's all-black student body favorably with "any class I have ever had," with special praise for two students named Grimké, who came to the university "just out of slavery."

[13] After getting established with his law practice in Boston, Massachusetts, Grimké met and married Sarah Stanley, a white woman from the Midwest.

In 1916, she wrote the play Rachel, which addressed lynching, in response to a call by the NAACP for works to protest the controversial film The Birth of a Nation.