Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924), African American editor and publisher of The Woman’s Era, the journal of the New Era Club, lived here for two decades. She founded the club for African American women in 1894. A year later, she organized a national conference to form the National Federation of Afro-American Women to show the existence of a “large and growing class” of cultured African American women. They met at the Charles Street A.M.E. Church (now Charles Street Meeting House) and merged with the Colored Women’s League to form the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. Ruffin served as the first vice president. In 1900 Ruffin led a protest when, although it was accepted by the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, the New Era Club was refused membership in the national federation for fear of offending Southern members.
Florida Ruffin Ridley(1861-1943), Ruffin’s daughter, became the second African American teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She was active with her mother in the New Era Club as well as in the League of Women for Community Service. She also became a member of several predominantly white clubs, including the Twentieth Century Club and the Women’s City Club of Boston. In addition to her work as a club woman and civil rights activist, Ridley was an essayist and journalist, focusing much of her writing on race relations in New England. In the 1920s, her interest in history led her to found the Society of the Descendants of Early New England Negroes. Through this work, she hoped to connect an understanding of history with contemporary work for social justice. African Americans and whites have always been involved, she wrote, “in the eternal war for justice and liberty which the state has waged.” Then, as in her own time, she believed both races deserved an equal place in society.
