The November 24th Historical Society program about Florida Ruffin Ridley at the Brookline Library has been postponed. We plan to hold the program after the New Year. Details about a new date and time will be made available once they have been confirmed.
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Brookline’s Town Meeting will vote in late November on a new name for the Coolidge Corner School (the former Edward Devotion School). The name recommended by the School Committee – following a process led by students at the school – is Florida Ruffin Ridley. (Hers is one of three proposed names that Town Meeting will vote on.)
Ridley, who lived in Brookline with her family from the 1890s to the 1920s was an educator – the second African American teacher in the Boston schools. She was also a writer, an editor, an organizer, and an activist who fought for civil rights and women’s rights. This presentation by Dolita Cathcart, Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College, will offer a look at the evolution of black political participation and protest in Boston and nationally and the role played by Ridley, her mother, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others from Reconstruction to the Great Depression.
Professor Cathcart received her PhD in history from Boston College in 2004. Her teaching and research interests focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American women’s political and social history. She has written on the civil rights movement and immigrant women in the United States. Her research has been published in The Historical Journal of Massachusetts, History: Review of New Books, and The Journal of Southern History. Professor Cathcart has appeared as an on-camera scholar for the National Geographic series Origins: The Journey of Humankind and the PBS documentary Birth of a Movement.
