Boston Memorial Honors Social Activist Kip Tiernan, Founder of Rosie's Place and Greater Boston Food Bank
Kip Tiernan, Photo courtesy of Rosie's Place
The next time you are exploring Boston's Irish Heritage Trail, stop by the memorial to Kip Tiernan (1926-2011), social activist, writer, teacher, visionary and provocateur.
The Kip Tiernan Memorial is located in Boston's Back Bay on Dartmouth Street between Newbury and Boylston streets, next to Old South Church, and honors her relentless fight for economic and social justice, and her special attention to helping homeless women.
She is best known for founding Rosie’s Place on Easter Sunday in 1974, the first shelter in America to specifically address the issues confronting homeless women. What began as a place to distribute clothing and give out coffee, flowers and comfort became a year-round emergency program. Today, Rosie’s Place provides health care, legal advice, job opportunities, education, daycare and affordable housing, depending on the needs of each woman who enters. Rosie’s also functions as a full time advocacy group to affect government policy and social inequities that most impact women and poor people.
Over her illustrious life, Kip also founded Boston’s Health Care for the Homeless, the city of Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission and the Greater Boston Food Bank, which today is the largest hunger-relief organization in New England and among the largest food banks in the country.
Family History
Kip’s grandparents, James and Jane Farrell, emigrated from Ireland to America in 1887 and settled in Connecticut, raising eight children, including Kip’s mother Anna, who was the oldest. Anna was a telephone operator and lived with her parents until she was 26. Her father was a carpenter.
Anna married a local Irish-American from New Have named Edward G. Tiernan in November 1924. His parents were John T. Tiernan and Mary E. (Smith) Tiernan.
Mary Jane (Kip) Tiernan was born on June 17, 1926 in New Haven. Her father Edward died on Christmas Eve in 1926, when Kip was six months old.
When Kip was eleven, her mother Anna died, leaving Kip to be raised by her grandmother, Jane Farrell, during the Great Depression and throughout World War II at her home at 38 Spring Street in New Haven. Two of her uncles, James and Eugene, also lived there while Kip was growing up, according to 1940 US Census records.
As a teenager, Kip had flying lessons and took up jazz, according to later accounts of her life. In 1947, Kip moved to Boston to attend the Boston Conservatory, then started a career in advertising and public relations.
In the 1960s, Kip began volunteering St. Philip's Warwick House, a Catholic parish and organizing center in Roxbury, having been influenced by the Catholic workers movement that included activists Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan.
Writer James Carroll first met her at Warwick House when he was a young priest, and she posed a question to him that she repeated many times in her life: "Whose side are you on? One stands with the crucified or the crucifier. There is no middle way."
Her Catholic faith was central to Tiernan's persona, wrote Carroll. "A rooted woman, Kip always wears that cross, which marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, 'an angry daughter of Christ." That perspective informed her life, and was grounded in a unbridled respect for the poor people she served.
Dr. Jim O'Connell, who worked closely with Tiernan and is known as the Street Doctor for his work with Boston's homeless population, wrote that Tiernan "demanded that our program embrace social justice and not charity," telling them "Never forget that charity is scraps from the table and justice is a seat at the table.”
Kip died on July 2, 2011 at age 85 from cancer.
Learn more about Boston's Irish Heritage Trail, formed in 1994 to chronicle Boston Irish people from the 17th century to today. Read about plans to expand the Irish Heritage Trail across Massachusetts.
Research + Text by Michael Quinlin
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