Ward 9 Club

Charles’s ambitions extended beyond domestic work. In the mid-1890s he and a group of his peers began to explore Black political work in Boston, forming the Black Democratic Ward 9 Club in 1895. The sixteen founding members worked quickly to establish a presence in Boston and July of that year saw several announcements of their activities in local newspapers, including one in The Boston Globe stating that their objective would be “to perpetuate Democratic principles and to support Democratic nominees in state and municipal a !airs,” and noting that “the members express themselves as being determined to do honest work for the advancement of the party, and have pledged themselves to do all in their power to elect Democratic nominees.”

By the 1880s Ward Nine had long been a historical center of Black life in Boston, and it housed up to half the city’s Black population near Mass General Hospital by the late nineteenth century. This geographic concentration of Black voters gave Ward 9 particular political leverage and provided an opportunity for Black politicians to rise in racially divided Boston. The phenomenon did not go unnoticed, however, and as the notion of a biracial democracy stalled, Boston began to redraw its maps, redistricting in 1875 and 1895 and finally creating a divide in the West End that moved many of its Black residents into Ward Eleven. This move purposefully diluted the concentration of Black voters within a single district and greatly diminished their political influence.

It was at this moment that Charles Bowie appeared to begin engaging with local politics, perhaps motivated by the redistricting. His choice to align himself with Democratic politics makes him part of a small subset who believed that the Republican promise of Reconstruction had already failed and that policies to advance the rights of the previously enslaved did not go far enough, particularly as related to voting rights. Not content with the spoils of continual compromise, these advocates argued for race over party and abandoned the Republican platform, pursuing electoral politics as a more direct pathway towards the equity they sought.

Over the next five years the club pushed back against Black political suppression, working to place their members in elected positions in Boston with limited success as the promise of Reconstruction faded into the Jim Crow era. Charles was nominated for the Massachusetts Common Council in 1896, although he didn’t win. In 1898, he was nominated by the 11th Ward Democratic caucus for the Common Council. The Ward 11 Club seems to have disappeared by 1900.