Her life offers insight into the differences and similarities between free people and former slaves in the North and South and their experiences with racism and sexism in the period between the American Civil War and the Great Depression.

Primus was born into a prominent Black family in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended the First African School, located in the basement of the Talcott Street Congregational Church.

Most of her papers were acquired by the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History in Hartford in 1934 and an additional group of correspondence to her was obtained by Harvard University's Schlesinger Library in 2017.

The letters have been studied by numerous scholars as they provide a rare glimpse of the Black community from an insider's point of view.

[7] She also helped members of the Black community, providing boarding rooms and employment networks, particularly for young women.

[8] Holdridge's maternal grandfather, Gad Asher, was kidnapped from Guinea, West Africa, in the 1740s and transported to Connecticut by slave traders.

[6][12] The family were members of the Talcott Street Congregational Church,[6] whose pastor was the former slave and abolitionist, James W. C. Pennington.

[15] An avid reader, Primus read novels and literary works, history books and biographies, religious texts, and the Black press.

[6][17] The house was mortgaged and in hopes of paying it off, Holdridge agreed to go with his employer, C. N. Humphrey, to the California gold fields.

[18] Although he did not find gold, Holdridge worked for Alvin Adams's delivery company in Sacramento and was able to secure funds for his passage home and pay off the mortgage.

[4] Primus, who assisted in the education of her younger siblings, opened a private school for girls in the family home by 1860.

[14][28] At the end of the American Civil War (1863), the country entered the reconstruction era and legislation was passed in 1865, to establish a social-welfare program to assist former slaves in transitioning from bondage to a life of freedom.

[32] There, the forty-seven Black teachers and thirty-one White ones were segregated by race and assigned to schools by the Freedmen's Aid Society of Baltimore.

He purchased his manumission in 1859 and worked as a horse trainer on the estate of Edward Lloyd, who had owned a property where Frederick Douglass was enslaved.

[36][37] Within a month, Primus opened the school in the local Black church,[38] initially teaching thirty-six students.

[43] The Freedmen's Aid Society of Hartford provided lumber and the women of the Talcott Street Congregational Church held fundraisers to pay for its construction.

[61] In 2017, the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University acquired a collection of forty-one additional letters which had been written to Primus.

Du Bois, Primus's life provides evidence of the importance of Black women who went to The South as teachers for newly freed slaves.

[42] As there had previously been no schoolhouse for Black students, Primus founded the first school for African Americans in Royal Oak, Maryland, and it was named after her, which would have been highly unusual.

[5][61][Notes 6] The letters provide an insight into the personal thoughts, political consciousness, encounters with racism and sexism and the public and private lives of ordinary black women between the Reconstruction era and Great Depression.

[70] The letters present an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of Primus and Brown as they were not written like slave narratives or works created during the Harlem Renaissance to be consumed by a White audience.

[71] Numerous scholars and writers have evaluated the letters,[72] and concluded that they showed love and desire in historic contexts that do not necessarily fit into the current constructs of sexuality.

In other ways they differ, as they speak of their sisterhood and bonds of community, efforts at racial uplift, as well as making "explicit references to erotic interactions" between the two women.

[75] Sociologist Karen Hansen, noted that what she called "bosom sex",[76][77] and what historian Leila J. Rupp termed "touching of the breasts",[78] was clear in its eroticism and unlikely to be found in White romantic narratives of the period.