Patrice Jean-Baptiste plays Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin in ‘A New Era.”

Playwright Miranda Austen ADEkoje (left) and director Summer L. Williams

At the Charles Street Meeting House, an 1807 building at 70 Charles St. that was once home to Charles Street AME Church, a pillar of Beacon Hill’s Black community, a plaque honors one of its leaders, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924). Citing her activism of 130 years ago, it describes Ruffin as an “African American civil rights leader, editor the Woman’s Era Journal [and] convener in 1895 of the first convention of African American women.”

On July 27, 1895, Ruffin convened a three-day conference in Boston to press for legislation that would criminalize lynching. She and others then gathered at Charles Street AME Church and formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women to bring about “a new era to the colored women of America.”

Ruffin lived to see Congress begin work on anti-lynching legislation although it took more than a century to produce a law: the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022. The organization which she and other conference members founded was a precursor to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, which remains active today.

Ruffin and her companions will come to life on stage July 18 to Aug. 8 at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester in the Company One Theatre (C1) world premiere of “A New Era,” written by Miranda Austen ADEkoje and directed by Summer L. Williams, C1’s cofounder and associate artistic director. All tickets are “Pay-What-You-Want” for this production.

C1’s robust track record and stature in the community — including access to the more than 1,000 seat Strand Theatre — came in handy when federal funding was slashed for the National Park Service, which had commissioned “A New Era.” The play was to be a site-specific historical reenactment in a 40-seat venue on Beacon Hill. When the project was cancelled, ADEkoje and Williams had been working on it for three years.

“This is a story about Black women in Boston written by a Black woman of Boston,” said Williams. “And it’s gorgeous. So, I was like, ‘We’re doing this.’ We now have the opportunity to make it larger for the Strand.”

An actress and playwright, ADEkoje is a fourth-generation Bostonian. Her paternal grandfather, Boston Police Department Superintendent Herbert A. Craigwell, was a founder of the Soul Patrol, an all-Black unit that in 1971 policed Dorchester and Roxbury.

Each of ADEkoje’s eight characters is a Black woman. Six, including Ruffin, are drawn from history, and two are fictional. Together, they represent the widely contrasting perspectives of the conference’s 53 delegates, who represented 26 Black women’s clubs from 14 states and Washington, D.C.

Set in 1895, the play opens as they gather in the Beacon Hill home of Ruffin. The daughter of biracial parents, Ruffin is married to George L. Ruffin, the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School and the first Black judge in New England.

“Josephine is in her 50s while the other women are in their 30s,” ADEkoje said during a phone interview.

“I had all these writings from these women’s pens. Some began their lives enslaved — two conceived by rape. They had lived through plantation life, Emancipation, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Then they became writers and pioneers in Black feminism. With the rise of the KKK, Jim Crow and lynching, they saw their rights being snatched away. Josephine is very much aligned with white women abolitionists in Boston while to the 30-year-olds who had experienced enslavement, aligning with white women sounds crazy.”

Williams finds that ADEkoje’s play turns a historic event into an urgent contemporary story.

“Our current political moment feels akin to that of 1895, when Reconstruction was fading away to a new reality under Jim Crow,” Williams said. “Then and now, people see hope and opportunity being erased from this country. There’s no better way to equip ourselves to resist this than to know that history and to understand it.”

Williams intends to conjure the urgency in ADEkoje’s script.

“We want to bring this story to the Strand in a way that feels as large as that space and also finds its closeness and immediacy — so that when everyone on stage is yelling, trying to vote for something, the audience might want to yell, too. The theater is so big that there sometimes seems to be a divide between the actors and the audience. I’m interested in disrupting that and blurring the lines a bit.”

The play endows these women’s words with the immediacy and rawness of truth being told.

“Women in 1895 are figuring out how to build a coalition across race and class for the greater good,” Williams said. “It’s not common knowledge and it should be. But we don’t want the veil of history to rub out the difficulty, the frustration, the joy, the laughter and the tears that make theirs a very human story.

“It’s also fun and funny. It’s women talking. Women are funny. We’re quick. We see what’s coming, name it and get right to the point.”

ON THE WEB

Learn more about the production at companyone.org/a-new-era