Julia Ringwood Coston

The first fashion magazine for Black women was Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion in 1891. It is remarkable not only as evidence that the black middle class had advanced sufficiently by the early 1890s to support a fashion magazine, but also for the first appearance in print of the term Afro-American.

The owner of Ringwood's Journal, is not well remembered. There are no books written about who she was and why she did or did not become great. While having begun and edited the first magazine aimed at and written by African American women is an achievement worthy of praise.

Julia Ringwood Coston (1863 - 1931), was born on Ringwood's Farm in Warrenton, Virginia. Her family migrated from their southern plantation home to Washington, D.C., following the Civil War. In Washington, she spent much of her postbellum childhood in school, excelling and enjoying it. Her later childhood was spent as the family breadwinner; she was forced to drop out of school at the age of 13 and work as a governess in the home of a Union general and was eventually able to continue her studies.

In the spring of 1886, she married William Hilary Coston, (1859 - 1942), a noted author and graduate of Wilberforce and Yale Divinity School. He had published, 'A Freeman and Yet a Slave' (1884), a pamphlet of eighty-four pages, and may have broadened her formal education. A longer version of the same book was published in 1888 in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, which may suggest they lived there at one time.

In 1899 her husband published, 'The Spanish-American War Volunteer; Ninth United States Volunteer Infantry Roster, Biographies, Cuban Sketches.' He also wrote a pamphlet, 'The Betrayal of the American Negroes as Citizens, as Soldiers and Sailors by the Republican Party in Deference to the People of the Philippine Islands.'

The Costons settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where her husband became the pastor of Saint Andrew's Church and Julia Coston began publishing Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion, also known as Ringwood's Home Magazine using her maiden name.

The Lynchburg Counselor says, "It is a beautiful 12-page journal, and the only publication of its kind on the market. Every colored woman in America should read it." The Philadelphia Recorder observed, "It is especially designed to be an Afro-American magazine, and is edited by colored women, but the pleasing fashion articles, instructive talks with girls and mothers, make Ringwood's Magazine a welcome addition to any home, whether its occupants be black or white."

The Richmond Planet emphasized that the 12-page journal, which sold for $1.25 a year, was a "typographical beauty." Edited by women's and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell.

Julia and her husband had two children, a son and daughter.

Julia Coston died on June 1, 1931, in Washington, D.C., of an apparent heart attack at the age of 68. She is buried in Warrenton, Virginia. Her husband, W.H. Coston died on June 27, 1942 at the age of 82. He is buried in Arlington, Virginia.

Sources: Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them by Noliwe M. Rooks; and 'fricana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience,, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.