Her father, George Lewis Ruffin, was the first African-American graduate of Harvard Law School and the first black judge in the United States.

[4] She taught at the Grant School from 1880 until her marriage in 1888 to Ulysses Archibald Ridley, owner of a tailoring business in downtown Boston.

Speakers at their first meeting included the abolitionist and religious leader Eliza Ann Gardner, noted African-American scholar Anna J. Cooper, and Ella Smith, the first black woman to receive an M.A.

[7] In 1923, Ridley conceived and directed an exhibit of "Negro Achievement and Abolition Memorials" at the Boston Public Library on behalf of the League.

She was a member of the Saturday Evening Quill Club, a literary group organized by Boston Post editor and columnist Eugene Gordon in 1925.

The Saturday Evening Quill, the group's annual journal, published the work of African-American women writers and artists, including Ridley, Helene Johnson, and Lois Mailou Jones.