Biography
Early Life
Florida Ruffin Ridley was a famed editor and writer in the club women’s magazine Women’s Era during the late nineteenth century. She was born to George and Josephine Ruffin – two prominent nineteenth-century trailblazers in Boston and national leaders in Black organizations.
She had a passion for education and became the second Black woman to teach in Boston public schools after graduating from the Boston Teachers College in 1882.
After marrying Ulysses Archibald Ridley in 1888, she stepped down from her teaching position and increased her involvement with community service. She organized for suffrage, women’s rights, and social justice causes.
Ridley maintained a tight-knit relationship with her mother and they established a national organization for Black women’s clubs, the notable Woman’s Era Club, a forerunner to the National Association for Colored Women (NACW) that was launched a year later in 1895.
The Woman’s Clubs
The Women’s Era Club and NACW held the mottos “Help to Make the Word Better” and “Lifting as We Climb” respectively, which showcased their intention for leadership and advocacy.
These philanthropic associations provided a central organizing hub for Black women. They collaborated on much-needed social welfare services for communities across the nation. Ridley wrote “We, the members of the Women’s Era Club, believe we speak for the colored women of America. We have organized, as have our women everywhere, to help in the world’s work, not only by endeavoring to uplift ourselves and our race, but by giving a helping hand and an encouraging word wherever they may be called.”
As the editor for the first newspaper created for and by Black women, Ridley helped to provide space for their intellectual ideas in the Women’s Era first newspaper by and for black women.
Religious Activism
Ridley’s faith was an undercurrent to her community involvement and motivated her to collaborate with Christians in her endeavors. She wrote in 1894, in “the interest of common humanity, in the interest of justice, for the good name of our country, we solemnly raise our voices against the horrible crimes of lynch law as practiced in the South, and we call upon Christians everywhere to do the same, or be branded as sympathizers with the murderers.”
She grew up attending the Unitarian Church and her faith also led her to be an organizer in religious spaces. When Ridley moved several miles outside of Boston to the town of Brookline, she became a founder of the Second Unitarian Church there in 1896.
In the early twentieth century, Ridley continued to be a national leader in the women’s club movement, working alongside her mother to found the League of Women for Community Service in 1920. She also combined her activism and faith by participating with the Colored Work Committee of the Young Women’s Christian Association during World War I.
In her later years, Ridley moved from New England to live with her daughter in Toledo, Ohio where she died in 1943. Today, Florida Ruffin Ridley continues to be heralded in Boston and Brookline for her community and religious activism.
