Black women's organizing: the Ruffin name, Hering House, and the clubs

1904 – 1996

The St. Pierre Ruffin Club, 1904: the earliest documented organization of Black women in South Bend enters the record at a founding. In the last week of April 1904, the first state convention of colored women's clubs met for two days at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Indianapolis — nineteen clubs represented by sixty delegates, reporting a membership of nearly five hundred — and organized the Indiana state federation, to stand as part of the national body of some four hundred clubs and eighteen thousand colored women; the work, in the Indianapolis Recorder's report, was "along moral, charitable and intellectual lines." The program printed May Wright Sewall, the national club leader, and J. Frank Hanly on "The Possibilities of Women's Clubs." And in the Recorder's list of the clubs represented, between the missionary societies of Indianapolis, stands the entry: "St. Pierre Ruffin club, South Bend." The city's Black clubwomen had organized under the name of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston — the publisher of the Woman's Era and a founder of the national colored women's club movement — early enough to sit at their state federation's creation. The club's own later course is not documented in the record reached for this section; its founding presence is, in the Black press of record.

Hering House: a generation later the club line runs through the city's great Black civic institution. Hering House, dedicated 8 March 1925 at 726 West Western Avenue and carried whole in the Black History section, housed among its congregations and services "women's and men's clubs in the line of the Ruffin's and Research clubs" — the Ruffin name carried into a second generation of South Bend clubwomen — and Josephine Curtis's H. T. Burleigh Music Association, a Black woman's musical institution seated in the House. The practical machinery of the House served women directly: the employment fight the Black History section tells — over training on industrial sewing machines — began with a visit to Hering House.

The later line: the documented thread reaches the modern record in the person of Helen Pope — the nurse whose desegregation work stands in the People section — who held leadership in African American women's groups among her organizations, and was president of the Our Day Together Club in 1996, when it held its Christmas dinner program at Olivet A.M.E. Church. Her papers, received by the IU South Bend Archives in 2007, and the scholarship that carries her name, are the club line's archive at its modern end. Between the Ruffin Club of 1904 and the Our Day Together Club of 1996 the record reached for this section is thinner than the organizations were — South Bend's Black women's clubs are documented at their founding, at their Hering House flowering, and in one modern presidency, and the decades between are named here as the gap they are, for the update cycle's work in the church and club records.

Sources:

1. The Indianapolis Recorder, 30 April 1904 (Hoosier State Chronicles), read first-hand — the first state convention of colored women's clubs at Bethel A.M.E., the nineteen clubs and sixty delegates, the federation's object and national affiliation, the Sewall and Hanly addresses, and the represented-clubs list carrying the St. Pierre Ruffin Club of South Bend.
2. Black History section of this history (banked) — Hering House whole: the dedication of 8 March 1925, the Ruffin's and Research clubs, Josephine Curtis's H. T. Burleigh Music Association, and the sewing-machine employment fight begun at the House.
3. People section of this history (banked) — Helen Pope: her leadership in African American women's groups, the Our Day Together Club presidency of 1996 and its Olivet A.M.E. Christmas dinner program, her papers at the IU South Bend Archives (2007), and the scholarship in her name.