South End Tour

In the Back Bay Station, Tina Allen’s statue of A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, signifies the importance of the role of porters in developing and sustaining African American communities all over the country, including one in the South End. Women in the union’s Boston Ladies’ Auxiliary served as hostesses at the nearby union headquarters every afternoon. Although one of the union’s goals was for the men to make a living wage so their wives would not have to work, women did operate boarding houses where porters from other cities could stay between runs. Los Angeles Sculptor Tina Allen (1949-2008), whose goal was to preserve the African American legacy, sculpted many other statues of African American leaders including one of Sojourner Truth in Battle Creek, Michigan.

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Among the businesses serving the South End African American community was the Reid Funeral Home founded in 1926 by Cora Reid McKerrow (1888-1984) and her brother Millard Fillmore Reid. After his death, McKerrow ran the funeral home for thirty years until she closed it in 1971. McKerrow was born into a family of fifteen children in Churchland, Virginia. When she first came to Boston, she worked as a chiropodist and beautician until she became a partner with her brother.

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The Boston Normal School, designed to train women teachers for the Boston Public Schools, became a separate entity when it moved from Girls’ High to the top floors of the Rice School in 1876. Founded in 1852, the two-year normal course trained women to be assistants to male masters in primary and grammar schools. When the Normal School moved to the Rice School, women were required to be high school graduates and the course was one year, becoming two years in 1892. Women assistants taught in the two training schools: a boys’ grammar school in the Rice School and a mixed primary school, the Appleton Street School (later the Bancroft School). By the time Boston Normal was renamed Boston Teachers College in 1922, it had its own building on Huntington Avenue and, in 1925, a four-year program. In 1952 the Teachers College became part of the state college system and, as Boston State College, merged with the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1965.

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The Harriet Tubman Crusaders, an African American branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Boston, created the first Harriet Tubman House in 1904 as a residence for African American women who were excluded from the city’s college dormitories and respectable rooming houses. The Crusaders rented a brownstone on Holyoke Street until 1909 when member Julia O. Henson donated her own townhouse at 25 Holyoke Street as a permanent headquarters for the organization’s expanding programs. Harriet Tubman visited Boston several times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often staying with Julia Henson at this site. In 1960, the Harriet Tubman House merged with other settlement houses in the area to form the United South End Settlements (USES).

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Dedicated at a community-wide celebration on June 20, 1999, these two powerful statues by African American women sculptors stand as a testament to the African American drive for freedom. Although Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) completed Emancipation in 1913 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not cast in bronze until it was selected to be placed at Harriet Tubman Square. Instead of showing the paternalism of a white president freeing enslaved people, Fuller presented the freedman and freedwoman as active agents moving out of slavery into the world. Fuller was a community activist herself in addition to being a sculptor. She married Solomon Carter Fuller, America’s first African American psychiatrist in 1909.

In Step on Board, Boston-based Fern Cunningham (1949-2020) shows both the power and compassion of Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. Among Cunningham’s other public sculptures in Boston are Earth Challengers at the Joseph Lee School in Dorchester, Sentinel in the Forest Hills Cemetery, and Rise in Mattapan Square.

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As the first woman supervisor in the Boston Public Schools, appointed in 1876, Lucretia Crocker (1829–86) pioneered the discovery method of teaching mathematics and the natural sciences during her decade-long tenure. Earlier, she joined Abby May (1829–86) and three other women in their successful drive to be the first women elected to the Boston School Committee. Previously, Crocker’s ten years of service to the Teachers’ Committee of the Freedmen’s Aid Society included visits to schools in the South as well as selecting and training teachers and providing curriculum. She also taught at Antioch College under Horace Mann’s presidency to illustrate her belief in women’s right to higher education.

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An author, critic, correspondent, and hostess to literary notables of her day, Louise Chandler Moulton (1835–1908) was perhaps best known as a person who encouraged new talent and introduced American readers to new poets and writers. Her influence extended over both Boston and London where annually for six months in each place she held weekly salons for writers over a period of three decades. Among the people with South End roots who attended her salon was the Irish American writer Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920). Chandler’s own writings included poems, travel and narrative sketches, children’s stories, and reviews frequently published in the journals and newspapers of her era. Like many other women of the time, Moulton was also interested in the practice of spiritualism.

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Estella Crosby (1890–1978), beautician and community activist, formed the Boston unit of the Housewives League with Geneva Arrington and E. Alice Taylor. The organization was active from the 1930s to the 1960s with units in many major cities. Its goal was to overcome economic and educational barriers to African American advancement. Crosby also operated a dry goods store with her husband and was active in trade unions.

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Mildred Davenport (1900–90) housed her dance studio at this address. Born in Roxbury, Davenport became a trailblazing dancer and renowned dance instructor. A graduate of Boston University’s Sargent College, she taught physical education at Tuskegee Institute (later University) in Alabama from 1921 to 1932. Later she entered show business. In 1938 she danced her interpretation of African American spirituals with the Boston Pops. She appeared on Broadway with such revues as Blackbirds and Flying Colors and danced with white performers including Imogene Coca and Clifton Webb, virtually unprecedented for an African American dancer in that period. For more than five years she toured in the Chocolate Revue in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D. C. When she put her dancing career behind her, she served as an officer in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. From 1947 to 1968, she worked for the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. She also founded the 464 Community Workshop, a fund raising auxiliary of the Women’s Service Club.

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In 1932, Anna Bobbitt Gardner (1901-97) became the first African American women to be awarded a bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music. She operated at least five studios in Boston under the same name for more than sixty years. She first opened the Academy in 1924 in the basement of her home. She managed Colored American Nights, featuring African American musicians at Symphony Hall, and produced local radio and television programs for an African American audience. In 1945, Gov. Maurice J. Tobin appointed her state director of Negro History Week programs to accompany fine arts exhibits at selected historic buildings. Succeeding governors reappointed her to the position. Since 1997, the New England Conservatory has granted a musician the Anna Bobbitt Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Gladys A. Moore Perdue (1898-1998) received a Diploma in Pianoforte from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1924. From 1925 to 1931, she taught music at Tuskegee Institute. After she returned to Boston, the Albanian Church in South Boston appointed her as its organist for thirty years. Among her many performances in the South End was music accompanist for the 464 Follies performed by the Women’s Service Club. For her one hundredth birthday, the Back Bay Stompers, a jazz sextet comprised of New England Conservatory students, entertained Gladys Perdue and other residents of Goddard House in Jamaica Plain.

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For seven years between 1882 and 1889, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), founder of the Church of Christ Scientist (Christian Science Church), operated the Massachusetts Metaphysical College at this site. More than 4,000 students attended her classes during this period. Eddy also conducted church services in the building. A few years before moving here, the Christian Science Association had voted to organize as a church and ordained her as its pastor. Here she published the first issue of the Journal of Christian Science and her sixth edition of Science and Health, which she would continue to revise throughout her life. The religion she founded grew rapidly and in 1895, the “Mother Church” was installed in its first building on Huntington Avenue. The domed building followed in 1906.

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Before the widening of Massachusetts Avenue in the 1950s, Chester Square was an elegant park surrounded by a wrought iron fence and centered with a fountain. Among the notable women living there with their families was writer Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy Waterston (1812–99). She was a minister’s wife and the daughter of Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy. Archeologist Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871–1945) was born and spent her childhood on Chester Square. After training at Smith College and joining excavations in Crete, she became the first woman to lead an archaeological expedition when she discovered the ancient town of Gournia on Crete. In later years she also served as a volunteer nurse during the Greco-Turkish War and World War I.The South End Historical Society has worked to preserve the history and restore the buildings of the South End. The Society purchased 532 Massachusetts Avenue in the 1970s and occupies the parlor on the second floor which still has many original features. Architect Luther Briggs Jr. designed the building in 1860 for Francis and Zervia Dane. Realtor Betty Gibson (1907-1991) also helped revitalize the South End. In the 1960s she moved to 530 Massachusetts Avenue to demonstrate her commitment to the area’s renewal.

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The League of Women for Community Service is one of the oldest African American women’s organizations in the city. The League honored its first president Maria Louise Baldwin (1856–1922) by dedicating their library to her in 1921. Baldwin was the first African American woman headmaster in New England, serving for over thirty years as head of the Agassiz School in Cambridge. In 2002 in her honor, the city renamed the school the Baldwin School. Among other presidents were Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842–1924), founder of the Women’s Era Club and publisher of the Women’s Era newspaper, and her daughter Florida Ruffin Ridley (1861–1943), the second African American teacher in the Boston Public Schools. Other presidents included Wilhelmina Crosson (1900–91), another pioneering African American teacher in the Boston schools who became the second president of Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, a preparatory school for African American young people, and Gladys Holmes(1892–1969), a Radcliffe graduate who was an author, educator, and social worker.

The presence of author Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) in the South End covers many areas and activities. The Louisa May Alcott School was on this site from 1910 until it closed in 1961. A settlement house named the Louisa May Alcott Club, located on 15 Oswego Street north of East Berkeley Street, offered activities to Italian and Jewish immigrants.

In addition, Louisa May Alcott herself lived off and on in the South End, both with her family and as an independent woman. As early as 1835, they lived in three locations in the South End, including rooms on Harrison Avenue and Beach Street, before moving to Concord in 1840. By 1848 the family was back, living in a small house on Dedham Street. For a brief time, Louisa assisted her sister Anna B. Alcott (1831-93) who operated a school on Canton Street. In later life, Louisa often spent summers with the family in Concord and winters in Boston; for example, in the winter of 1873 she brought her family to 26 East Brookline Street overlooking Franklin Square. The South End and Concord came together when Louisa rented a quiet room on West Brookline Street for several months in 1868 where she wrote the sequel to Little Women.

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Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was a social worker, government official, and lifelong advocate for social justice and economic security. As U.S. Secretary of Labor 1933-45, she was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, and the driving force behind Social Security and other programs that still provide financial security for all Americans. She was born here at #12 Worcester Square on April 10, 1880, to parents recently arrived from Newcastle, Maine. The family moved two years later to Worcester, Massachusetts where Frances was educated in the public schools. As a student at Mount Holyoke College, she witnessed the miserable working conditions of child textile laborers in Holyoke, Massachusetts and vowed to dedicate her career to remedying them. She later worked for women’s suffrage, as a social worker and factory investigator, and was NY State Labor Commissioner, where she successfully lobbied for groundbreaking legislation establishing worker protections. She served throughout the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, later as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, and taught at Cornell University for the last ten years of her life.

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Dr. Samuel Gregory founded the New England Female Medical College in 1848 because he believed having male doctors deliver babies offended female decency. Despite his limited goals, the college did open its doors to women for medical training and did employ a female faculty. Among the college’s graduates in 1864 was Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831–95) who is considered to be the first professional African American woman doctor. Julia Ward Howe, Ednah Dow Cheney, and Abby May were among others who served on the Board of Lady Managers. In 1859 Dr. Marie Zakrzewska (1829-1902) asked that a clinical department be added so students could get practical experience. When the college closed the clinic after she left in 1862, Zakrzewska and the clinic’s board members founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children.

The New England Female Medical College moved to several different locations in the South End until 1870 when it erected its own building on East Concord Street. In 1873, Boston University (BU) took over the Female Medical College as its own School of Medicine, practicing homeopathy and making it coeducational. Women faculty from the Female Medical College who continued at the BU School of Medicine included Dr. Adeline B. Church (1846–1927) and Dr. Mary Safford-Blake (1834–91), who both taught gynecology, and Dr. Caroline Hastings (1841–1922), who taught anatomy. Safford-Blake is considered the first woman gynecologist. She was also involved in homeopathy, and made such a reputation as a Civil War nurse that she was called the “Cairo Angel.” She later held a term on the Boston School Committee as did Hastings who served for six years.

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Boston’s settlement house movement was one of the earliest in the country. Initiated in Boston by Robert A. Woods as Head Resident in 1891, the South End House had many locations in the South End and Lower Roxbury and included women’s and men’s residences. The present South End House is the headquarters of the United South End Settlements. Among the social workers who served at the South End House was Gladys Gusson (1935-88) who counseled families, was a tenant advocate, and ran after-school groups and girls’ clubs. The Children’s Art Centre, incorporated in 1914 and built in 1918, was the first fine arts museum for children in the country. The Centre offers a wide range of art and music for children under the sponsorship of the USES. Another South End institution, the Community Music Center of Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts, was founded in 1910 by Annie Endicott Nourse (1878–1965), a piano teacher.

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A high school for girls opened in 1852 after more than twenty-five years of efforts to provide high school education for girls. The new Girls’ High opened on this site in 1870. Girls’ Latin School was added as a separate school in the same building in 1877 (but with the same headmaster) after the first women elected to the Boston School Committee used their new political power to guarantee girls a Latin School education. The building was considered to be elegant with 66 classrooms, “all well lighted and cheerful”, and an assembly hall on the upper story. Girls’ High continued at this site until 1954, but by 1907 all Girls’ Latin School classes had moved into the new Boston Normal School building on Huntington Avenue.

Girls continued to go to a Latin school separate from boys until 1972 when the Latin schools became coeducational, ending 337 years of a separate Latin school education for boys. Among the graduates of Girls’ Latin when it was at this site was Mary Antin (1881–1949). Born in Russia, Antin immigrated with her family to America in 1894. They eventually moved to the South End where Antin took advantage of the public schools and library. Her book, The Promised Land, was a best seller when it was published in 1912. A classic about the American immigrant experience, the book captures the heart of the South End of her youth, particularly in the New York streets area between what is now East Berkeley and the Massachusetts Turnpike, a community wiped out by urban renewal in the 1960s.

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A former well-known residence for working women and students, the Franklin Square House provided decent and safe housing for Boston women for more than forty years in the mid twentieth century. In addition to individual rooms, the building had a ballroom on the first floor edged with curtained cubicles with couches, where the women could entertain their guests. A cafeteria provided breakfast, dinner, and box lunches. The Blue Goose restaurant on the main floor was open to the public.

Annie McKay (1867-1944), Boston’s pioneering first school nurse lived here in 1905. Because of the era’s 13% rate of school absenteeism, the Boston School Committee in 1905, in an experimental and privately funded program with the Instructive District Nurse Association, appointed Annie McKay, a trained nurse, to supplement the work of physicians. She was assigned three schools in the South End: the Quincy, Way Street and Andrews. This program, judged an overwhelming success in improving student health and attendance, moved the state to pass legislation in 1907 mandating school health services throughout Massachusetts. The marker honoring McKay was installed in 2009 by the Massachusetts School Nurse Association.

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The Sisters of St. Joseph directed and staffed Cathedral High School for many years after its founding in 1926. In addition to emphasizing academic excellence, the high school staff encourages the culturally diverse student body to participate in the school’s sports, drama, and choral programs. The Sisters of St. Joseph operated St. Helena’s House at 89 Union Park Street as housing for women who had just arrived in Boston. It was formerly the Grey Nuns Home for Working Girls and is now low-income housing.

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Helen Morton (1898-1991) was a long-time South End activist, beginning with her service as a worker in the South End House in 1922 after she graduated from the Simmons College School of Social Work. In 1945, she helped with post war restoration in Europe. She returned in 1949 as associate head worker of the South End House and later as woman’s worker for nearby St. Stephen’s Church. Morton changed from a social worker to a political activist during the 1960s when she joined the effort to create Villa Victoria out of the city’s Parcel 19. She and Paula Oyola were the two women chosen to break the ceremonial ground for Villa Victoria.

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Latino community residents founded Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA) in 1968 to develop and now maintain Villa Victoria, a subsidized housing community built on a parcel of city land slated for urban renewal. IBA promotes the social and economic well being of Villa Victoria’s residents with programs that support the arts, especially expressing the Latino cultural and artistic heritage. IBA offers intergenerational activities, programs for elders, educational initiatives, and job training.

Signs in the center of Villa Victoria illustrate community pride. One of the founders of Villa Victoria was Myrna Vazquez (1935–75), a renowned actress in Puerto Rico who had a lasting influence on the community. Although she lived in the South End only during the last year of her life, she was a charismatic political activist who combined art and action and helped found the IBA art component and the annual Puerto Rican Festival. Casa Myrna Vazquez, New England’s largest shelter for battered women, is named for her.

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This building is the headquarters of the Boston Ballet and one of the sites of the Boston Ballet School. The founder of the Boston Ballet in 1963 was E. Virginia Williams (1914–84), a dynamic leader and artist. A dancer herself, Williams chose to devote her life to creating the first professional repertory ballet company in New England. Under Williams’s leadership and those of her successors, the company is now one of the top five ballet companies in North America. Upon the recommendation of choreographer George Balanchine, Virginia Williams started the Boston Ballet with a large Ford Foundation grant, changing its name from the New England Civic Ballet Company. The Boston Ballet’s official debut was on January 25, 1965, in John Hancock Hall.

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