CHAPTER XXXIV.
MRS. JOSEPHINE ST. PIERCE RUFFIN
Was born in Boston at a time when her fair-haired English mother and swarthy Negro-Indian father could not walk together nnmolested even in the streets of the liberal (?) minded old Bay State. Her primary education was begun in the common schools, but after that she ran against a snag in the shape of a State law which prohibited the commingling of white and colored children in the higher schools. Josephine, unconscious of any law or reason to prevent this, had boldly and proudly entered the Franklin Grammar School, but at the end of six happy, triumphant months was brought face to face with that hydra-headed evil, race prejudice, the monster which has bruised the heart and broken the ambition of so many aspiring colored youth. Then began a contest; the law and the school committee on one side, and the then widowed mother and eight-year-old child on the other; it is needless to say which side won in this unequal fight (albeit the sympathy and moral support of the full corps of teachers of the school and that of the chairman of the school board was given to the legally weak side), for did not the law stand on the statute book and had not a saintly, philanthropic, but short-sighted soul, by the name of Smith, given a building to be forever set apart for the benefit of colored children solely?
