Ruth Smith Wells, Penn’s director of victim support and special services from 1976 to 1992 and a trailblazing female police officer in the City of Philadelphia, died on February 17. She was 94.

Born in North Philadelphia, Ms. Wells graduated from LaSalle University and the Pennsylvania Congress of Christian Education and also completed studies at Temple University. During the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, Ms. Wells was one of 19 women who joined the City of Philadelphia Police Department in 1955 after suing the police department to allow women to join. Later, she also sued the police department to obtain maternity leave. Along with fellow activist, the late C. Delores Tucker, Ms. Wells was a strong supporter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and frequently attended his rallies, meetings, and marches.

Ms. Wells’s activism continued for her entire life; in 2009, she witnessed the U.S. Senate vote to formally apologize for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation first proposed more than a century earlier. She was recognized in 2016 by the Equal Justice Initiative on the 100th anniversary of the death of Anthony P. Crawford, a successful cotton farmer and Ms. Wells’s grandfather, who was lynched by a White mob. “She was a civic leader, a passionate advocate for women’s rights and the disenfranchised, a trailblazer, a devout woman of God,” her niece Andrea Muhammad said in an online tribute.

In 1976, Ms. Wells left the Philadelphia Police Department and came to Penn’s Department of Public Safety, which had commissioned her to develop and oversee its public safety education and training program. While at Penn, Ms. Wells developed a campus-wide safety education program and created Penn’s victim support programs, which, unusually for the era, operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She developed the program to include medical referrals and to function in liaison with numerous on- and off-campus agencies to provide the best possible service. She also helped recruit women and minority officers to Penn’s Department of Public Safety, instituted new standards and procedures for officer training, and worked to develop walk-back services, blue-light emergency phones, restroom alarms, and other public safety mainstays that Penn still employs today.

When Ms. Wells retired from Penn in 1992 (Almanac November 10, 1992), Elena DiLapi, then director of the Penn Women’s Center, said that Ms. Wells’ liaison work with the city police has made a “significant difference in the way police respond not only to Penn women but to women throughout the city.” Penn’s former police commissioner John Kuprevich said he was “extremely sorry to lose Ruth Wells. What I have seen her do for the organization and for the University has been a real achievement. She has truly made a difference through prevention and support services. Ruth cares deeply about the people of the community around Penn as well as for the people of Penn. That’s not easy to find.”

Ms. Wells was a member of the Philadelphia Ethics Board, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (which has a scholarship in her name), and the Guardian Civic League. She was also a founding member of the Mayor’s Commission for Women, a former board chair of Women Organized Against Abuse, and the founder of the Women of Color Fellowship at Penn. As a longtime member of Christian Hope Baptist Church, Ms. Wells served as a deaconess, church secretary, and president of the Board of Christian Education, the senior choir, and the senior missionaries. She was active in the Baptist church at a national level, serving as president of the Women’s Division of the Pennsylvania State Baptist Convention and as director of the National Baptist Convention’s Young People’s Department and the New England Baptist Youth Ministry. Ms. Wells was featured in Ebony magazine, Jet, The Collegiate, Women in Policy, and other publications.

She is survived by her husband, Joseph; her children, Cheri, Joseph, Angela, Aimee, Kathres, Vikki, Andre, Abijah and Bernard; her grandchildren, Jason, Jennifer, Jazzmin, Stephanie, Alana, Khamar, Marletia, Sarah, Kira, Andre Jr., Jalen, Alexandra, Kai and Abijah Jr.; her seven great-grandchildren; and other family members and friends. A service was held on March 2.