Grimké sisters

Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), known as the Grimké sisters, were the first American female advocates of abolition and women's rights. They were writers, orators, and educators.

They grew up in a slave-holding family in the Southern United States but moved to the North in the 1820s, settling for a time in Philadelphia and becoming part of its substantial Quaker community. They became more deeply involved with the abolitionist movement, traveling on its lecture circuit and recounting their firsthand experiences with slavery on their family's plantation. Among the first American women to act publicly in social reform movements, they were ridiculed for their abolitionist activity. They became early activists in the women's rights movement. They eventually developed a private school.

Learning that their late brother had had three mixed-race sons, they helped the boys get educations in the North. Archibald and Francis J. Grimké stayed in the North, Francis becoming a Presbyterian preacher, but their younger brother John returned to the South.

Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, the father of the Grimké sisters, was a strong advocate of slavery and of the subordination of women. A wealthy planter who held hundreds of slaves, Grimké had 14 children with his wife. Three of the children died in infancy. Grimké served as chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

Sarah was the sixth child and Angelina was the thirteenth. Sarah said that at age five, after she saw a slave being whipped, she tried to board a steamer to a place where there was no slavery. Later, in violation of the law, she taught her personal slave to read.

...
Wikipedia