Twelfth Baptist Church
Notable Members Recognitions
Martin Luther King Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
​
More Information:
https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/martin-luther-king-jr/
​
​
Rebecca Lee Crumpler
First Black Female Doctor
Rebecca Lee Crumpler (born Rebecca Davis, February 8, 1831 – March 9, 1895) was an American physician, nurse and author. She was the first African-American female doctor of medicine, qualifying at the New England Female Medical College in 1864. Crumpler was also one of the first female physician authors in the nineteenth century. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses. The book has two parts that cover the prevention and cure of infantile bowel complaints, and the life and growth of human beings. Dedicated to nurses and mothers, it focuses on maternal and pediatric medical care and was among the first publications written by an African American on the subject of medicine.
​
More Information:
​
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html
​
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rebecca-lee-crumpler
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Editor of The First National Newspaper Published by and for African American Women
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (née St. Pierre; August 31, 1842 – March 13, 1924) was a publisher, journalist, civil rights leader, suffragist, abolitionist, and editor of the Woman's Era, the first national newspaper published by and for African American women.
​
More Information:​​
​
https://www.nps.gov/people/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin.htm
​
https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin/
Clarence "Jeep" Jones
Community Organizer and Advocate
Clarence "Jeep" Jones (April 17, 1933 – February 1, 2020) was an American community activist who was closely tied to the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston throughout his personal and professional life. Jones was the first African-American Deputy Mayor of the city of Boston. He had a 32-year career with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, serving as the Chairman of the board for 24 years.
​
More Information:​
​
George Lewis Ruffin
First African American Graduate from Harvard Law School​
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.
​
Read More:
​
https://mountauburn.org/notable-residents/george-lewis-ruffin-1834-1886/
​
​
Lewis and Harriet Hayden
Underground Railroad Conductors
Lewis Hayden (December 2, 1811 – April 7, 1889) escaped slavery in Kentucky with his family and reached Canada. He established a school for African Americans before moving to Boston, Massachusetts. There he became an abolitionist, lecturer, businessman, and politician. Before the American Civil War, he and his wife Harriet Hayden aided numerous fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, often sheltering them at their house.
Hayden was elected in 1873 as a Republican representative from Boston to the Massachusetts state legislature. He helped found numerous black lodges of Freemasons. Located on the north side of Beacon Hill, the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House has been designated a National Historic Site on the Black Heritage Trail in Boston.
Read More:
​
https://www.boston.gov/news/bostons-own-underground-railroad-conductors-harriet-and-lewis-hayden
William Monroe Trotter
Activist & Journalist
William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934), was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
​
Read More:
​
https://trotter.umich.edu/article/timeline-william-monroe-trotters-life
​
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/william-monroe-trotter-challenges-president-wilson
Shadrach Minkins
Liberated African
Shadrach Minkins (c. 1814 – December 13, 1875) was an African-American fugitive slave from Virginia who escaped in 1850 and reached Boston. He also used the pseudonyms Frederick Wilkins and Frederick Jenkins. He is known for being freed from a courtroom in Boston after being captured by United States marshals under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Members of the Boston Vigilance Committee freed and hid him, helping him get to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Minkins settled in Montreal, where he raised a family. Two men were prosecuted in Boston for helping free him, but they were acquitted by the jury.
​
More Information:
​
Anthony Burnes
Baptist Preacher
Anthony Burns (May 31, 1834 – July 17, 1862) was an African-American man who escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1854. His capture and trial in Boston, and transport back to Virginia, generated wide-scale public outrage in the North and increased support for abolition.​
​
Burns was eventually ransomed from slavery, with his freedom purchased by Boston sympathizers. He was educated at Oberlin Collegiate Institute and became a Baptist preacher. He was called to a position in Upper Canada (Ontario), where an estimated 30,000 refugee African Americans, both enslaved and free, had fled, to gain or retain their freedom. He lived and worked there until his death.
​More Information:
​
https://www.nps.gov/articles/-god-made-me-a-man-not-a-slave-the-arrest-of-anthony-burns.htm
Thomas Sims
First African American Appointed to the Department of Justice
Thomas Sims was an African American who escaped from slavery in Georgia and fled to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1851. He was arrested the same year under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, had a court hearing, and was forced to return to enslavement. A second escape brought him back to Boston in 1863, where he was later appointed to a position in the U.S. Department of Justice in 1877. Sims was one of the first slaves to be forcibly returned from Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The failure to stop his case from progressing was a significant blow to the abolitionists, as it showed the extent of the power and influence which slavery had on American society and politics. The case was one of many events leading to the American Civil War.
​
More Information:
​
https://www.nps.gov/articles/-the-whole-land-is-full-of-blood-the-thomas-sims-case.htm
Peter Randolph
Minister & Abolitionist
Rev. Peter Randolph (c. 1825 – August 7, 1897) was an African-American minister and abolitionist. Born into slavery in Virginia, he was freed in the will of his owner but this request took three years and legal proceedings to be honored. Randolph moved to Boston after being freed, where he became a pastor. He spent four years in Richmond, Virginia, after the end of the Civil War, before moving back to Boston. Randolph published an autobiographical account of his life that went through several editions.​
​More information:
​
John Sweatt Rock
Doctor, Lawyer, Abolitionist
John Stewart Rock (October 13, 1825 – December 3, 1866) was an African-American teacher, doctor, dentist, lawyer and abolitionist, historically associated with the coining of the term "black is beautiful" (thought to have originated from a speech he made in 1858, however historical records now indicate he never actually used the specific phrase on that day). Rock was one of the first African-American men to earn a medical degree. In addition, he was the first black person to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.
​
More Information:
​
https://www.nps.gov/people/john-s-rock.htm
​
​
Octavia Janet Coleston Grimes
Organizer and Activist
Octavia Grimes was a community and church organizer and the wife of prominent clergyman, Leonard A. Grimes of New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was mother to at least four children: Emma, John, Leonard, and Julia. The family’s racial identity fluctuates in census records, where household members are sometimes listed as “mulatto,” Black, or white. The Grimes family lived in Leesburg, Virginia and Washington, D.C. before moving to New Bedford, MA in 1846. Lee, Deborah A. “Leonard A. Grimes.” The Essence of a People II. Friends of the Thomas Balch Library.
​
More information:
​
https://allofusdha.org/research/age-disability-and-race-in-bostons-home-for-aged-colored-women/
​
https://coloredconventions.org/black-mobility/associated-women/octavia-grimes/