(Pictured above: Ruffin was one of several vice-presidents of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1896)
Josephine St. Pierre was born on August 31, 1842 into a well-respected Bostonian family (Streitmatter 2017). Taking full advantage of her, then unusual, position in society, St. Pierre married George Ruffin, one of the first African Americans to ever graduate from Harvard Law School, at the age of 16 and they immediately became active in the abolitionist movement (Streitmatter 2017).
To quote Ruffin herself from the magazine The Women’s Era, “If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered.” A hundred years before Martin Luther King Jr. made civil disobedience the go-to move of protesters around the nation, Ruffin was advocating much of the same. It was her actions, though, and not her words that made her dedication to rights activism so apparent.
1879: Ruffin created the Boston Kansas Relief Association, an organization dedicated to helping African Americans settle in Kansas (Streitmatter 2017).
1888: After her husband’s death, Ruffin deepened her social standing as a rights activist by becoming editor of The Woman’s Era, a newspaper devoted to the needs and concerns of African American women (Streitmatter 2017).
1894: Ruffin formed the Women’s New Era Club of Boston and served as its first president (Streitmatter 2017).
1895: Ruffin succeeded in bringing together several African-American women’s groups for the First National Conference of Colored Women. The following year, the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Woman’s Era Clubs of Boston and the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., merged to become the National Association of Colored Women (Streitmatter 2017).
1910: Ruffin became a founding member of the Boston NAACP (Streitmatter 2017).
Her achievements and dedication to progressive ideals make her the perfect Publisher for my blog.
Streitmatter, Rodger. 2017. “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin”. Pbs.Org. http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/newbios/nwsppr/Biogrphs/josephruff/joseph.html.