Born in 1824 the son of a professor at Washington College, William Henry Ruffner graduated from the same in 1842. [1] Soon thereafter he moved to Kanawha County, Virginia (now West Virginia) to revive a family-owned salt mine. He soon joined the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States (American Colonization Society), which he served for a few years. [2] His work for the Society comprised recruiting enslaved laborers to the idea of re-colonization to Liberia, convincing their owners to manumit them under the presumption of recolonization, and then escort those to be recolonized to their port of departure. Even after leaving the Society, Ruffner remained an ardent advocate for re-colonization as the best solution to the problem of slavery in America and the most effective way to advance the “civilization and Christianization of Africa.” [3] In these years, Ruffner expressed concerns about the spiritual and physical health of enslaved and free Blacks who labored in the region’s salt and coal mines. But he also vacillated on the subject of slavery. He believed that slavery was not economically viable, although he did not oppose biblical-based arguments in favor of slavery. He did not support his father’s view that all of the enslaved in Western Virginia should be emancipated. [4] He wrote in the Kanawha Republican, slavery was “neither dishonorable nor contrary to God’s Word, but it was an economic burden, and on that account should be gotten rid of.” [5] Through the 1850s and up to the Civil War, Ruffner served as a preacher and re-colonization advocate; in those same years he leased at least four enslaved African Americans and benefitted from the labor of six others owned by his father-in-law. [6] He served in the Confederate Army.

In July 1869, Virginians approved a constitution that provided for the creation of a free public school system in the state. Ruffner was elected Superintendent of Public Education in March 1870 and had thirty days to write the legislation outlining the public school system. [7] After completing a draft of the bill, Ruffner traveled to the University of Virginia, staying for two weeks, to review and edit the legislation with UVA law professor John B. Minor. The legislation created a public school system that was racially segregated and centralized, with the superintendent and state board of education having supervisory control over all school matters.

The great demand for teachers meant that standards for qualification were uneven and Ruffner advocated from the General Assembly money for teacher institutes and a normal school to provide adequate training. [8] The General Assembly denied his requests for a normal school. He secured money from the Peabody Fund to help finance local institutes. [9] Through the early 1870s, Ruffner was the leading agent of the building up of a public school system across Virginia. Ruffner published an essay in Scribner’s Monthly in 1874 titled “The Co-Education of White and Colored Races.” Designed as a rebuttal of the argument for integrated education proposed in the Civil Rights Bill of 1874, then under consideration in Congress, the essay is a clear articulation of his views of racial difference in these years. “With some small exceptions, the Africans are the lowest in the scale of races, while the white Americans ranked with the highest.” He then argues that the necessity of segregated education “is not simply a matter of prejudice, of pride, or of taste. If all these could be overcome, there is a moral reason which of itself prevents co-education everywhere that Negroes are numerous. They move on a far lower moral plane than the whites, as a class. Without going into particulars, it is enough to say that the average character and habits of these people render it highly proper in the whites to refuse to associate their children with them in the intimate relations of a school.” [10] Through Reconstruction in Virginia and against strong social and political resistance, Ruffner supported segregated public education and engaged in public debates with those calling for the elimination of public schools because of cost and because they threatened the social order by educating Blacks. Ruffner added that education “would foster among the Negroes a pride of race which would have a purifying and stimulating power and will gradually overcome that contemptible ambition to associate with white people, which has been instilled into their minds by the blundering policy of the Northern people and the Federal government.” [11] In 1880, Ruffner was able to implement segregated summer institutes for White and Black teachers.

Ruffner recognized the added fiscal cost of segregating school children, but his commitment to segregation was unwavering despite chronic school funding shortages in the late nineteenth-century. In Febrary of 1880, Ruffner made a public address to school superintendents at a National Educational Association meeting in Washington D.C. After lamenting the inadequacy of school funding and acknowledging segregation’s contribution to that inadequacy, Ruffner stated firmly, “It is idle for any one to suggest a mixture of the races. It can’t be done. We must educate in separate schools, or not at all.” Ultimately, while Ruffner was a firm believer in strong fiscal support for public education, segregation of the races was his first priority. [12]

Ruffner resigned from his position as Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1882. In 1885, Ruffner tried to get a position in the federal government, writing to President Grover Cleveland to request an appointment as the next U.S. Commissioner of Education. According to Ruffner’s contemporary Barnas Sears, Ruffner ultimately withdrew his application because he was “physically unequal” to the amount of work the position required. [13]

Ruffner was fascinated by Black history, and he studied accomplished Black men such as Booker T. Washington, John Chavis, and Jack Neal. However, Ruffner generally turned to White elites for information about Black people. Furthermore, he remained committed to the idea of Black racial inferiority. Ruffner expressed that idea clearly in an 1880 address to the National Education Association, declaring, “I have studied nothing so much as the negro, because he is an enigma, and yet a part of my work.” Ruffner went on to claim his years of study had given him some insight into the “spirit and capacity” of Black people. Ruffner argued that while Black people were generally amiable, religious, and interested in education, ultimately “as a class, they are in character weak and ignorant—and hence to that extent a dangerous element in society.” Ruffner was thus a firm supporter of Black education precisely because he felt that Black people were a threat to American society, and that they needed to be educated in “right views and habits” in order to safeguard American social order. [14]

Through the years preceding the Civil War, William Henry Ruffner vacillated on his views of slavery, generally finding full recolonization to Africa for all freed African Americans to be the best option to resolving the problem of slavery. After the Civil War, Ruffner was an ardent advocate for widespread segregated public education. His goal was to allow enough education for African Americans that they would no longer find it necessary to want integration. He was a lifelong segregationist.

There was no archival evidence for the rationale behind the naming of the Ruffner building.