Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (; August 31, 1842 – March 13, 1924 She completed her studies at the Bowdoin School (not to be confused with Bowdoin College), after segregation in Boston schools ended.

At 16 years old, she married George Lewis Ruffin (1834–1886), who later became the first African American graduate from Harvard Law School, the first African American elected to the Boston City Council, and the first African American municipal judge. The couple moved to Liverpool but returned to Boston soon afterwards and bought a house in the West End.

Activism

Working with her husband, Ruffin became active in the abolitionist movement. During the American Civil War, they helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army, specifically the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. They also worked for the Sanitation Commission, which provided aid for the care of soldiers in the field.

Ruffin supported women's suffrage and, in 1869, joined with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone to form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston. A group of these women, Howe and Stone also founded the New England Women's Club in 1868. Josephine Ruffin became its first black member when she joined in the mid-1890s.

Ruffin founded the first black woman's newspaper, The Woman's Era. She also wrote for the black weekly paper, The Courant, and became a member of the New England Woman's Press Association.

In 1910, Ruffin helped form the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also wrote a special suffrage edition of The Crisis in 1915.

Club work

In 1891, Ruffin served as the first president of Boston's Co-Worker's Club. In 1894, Ruffin organized the Woman's Era Club, an advocacy group for black women, with the help of her daughter Florida Ridley and Maria Baldwin, a Boston school principal.

In 1895, Ruffin organized the National Federation of Afro-American Women with Julia O. Henson. She convened the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America in Boston, which was attended by women from 42 black women's clubs from 14 states. The following year, the organization merged with the Colored Women's League to form the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC). Mary Church Terrell was elected president and Ruffin served as one of the organization's vice-presidents. and were widely covered in newspapers around the country, most of whom supported Ruffin. Afterwards, the Woman's Era Club made an official statement "that colored women should confine themselves to their clubs and the large field of work open to them there."

Legacy

In 1995, Ruffin was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In 1999 a series of six tall marble panels with a bronze bust in each was added to the Massachusetts State House; the busts are of Ruffin, Florence Luscomb, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Dorothea Dix, Sarah Parker Remond, and Lucy Stone. Two quotations from each of those women (including Ruffin) are etched on their own marble panel, and the wall behind all the panels has wallpaper made of six government documents repeated over and over, with each document being related to a cause of one or more of the women.

References

Further reading

  • Josephine Ruffin, activist, philanthropist and newspaper publisher at the African American Registry
  • African American Women in History
  • Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: A pioneer in the black women's club movement - Part 1
  • Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: A pioneer in the black women's club movement - Part 2