George Lewis Ruffin
American politician (1834-1886)
George Lewis Ruffin (December 16, 1834 – November 19, 1886) was an African-American barber, attorney, politician, and judge. In 1869, he graduated from Harvard Law School, the first African American to do so. He was also the first African American elected to the Boston City Council. Ruffin was elected in 1870 to the Massachusetts Legislature. In 1883, he was appointed by the governor Benjamin Franklin Butler as a judge to the Municipal Court, Charlestown district in Boston, making him the first African American judge in the United States. He married 16 year-old Josephine St. Pierre in 1858. Florida Ruffin Ridley was one of their children.
Biography
Ruffin was born to George W. (1800–1863) and Nancy Lewis Ruffin (1816–1874) in Richmond, Virginia as a free person of color, of African and European ancestry. The city had a large free Black community.
“George Lewis Ruffin” enters the record as american politician (1834-1886). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what George, Lewis and Ruffin can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5541711. VIAF identifies the subject as 2337252. The Library of Congress control number is nr93003066. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 1886, 1869 and 1870.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Lewis Ruffin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.