Mary Church Terrell

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Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell (born September 23, 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee - July 24, 1954 in Annapolis, Maryland) was a writer and civil rights and women's rights activist. Her parents, Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, were both former slaves. Robert Church reputedly became a self-made millionaire from real-estate investments in Memphis. He was said to be the son of his white master, Charles Church.

When Mary Church majored in classics at Oberlin College, she was an African-American woman among mostly white male students. She was not intimidated by that. Instead the freshman class elected her as class poet, and she was elected to two of the college's literary societies. Church also served as an editor of the Oberlin Review. When she earned her bachelor's degree in 1884, she was one of the first African-American women known to have earned a college degree. Next Church earned a master's degree from Oberlin in 1888.

In 1933 during Oberlin College's centennial celebration, Mary Church Terrell was recognized as among the college's top one hundred outstanding alumni [1]. In 1948, Oberlin conferred upon Mary Church Terrell the honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Church taught at a black secondary school in Washington, DC and at Wilberforce College in Ohio. She studied in Europe for two years, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian.

On October 18, 1891 in Memphis, Church married Robert Heberton Terrell. Robert Terrell was a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC. He also taught school and became a principal. After Mary Terrell's first three children died in infancy, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Phyllis Terrell[2]. The Terrells later adopted a second daughter, Mary.

As a high school teacher and principal, Mary Church Terrell was appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education, 1895-1906. She was the first black woman in the United States to hold such a position.

Through her father, Mary met Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. She was especially close to Douglass and worked with him on several civil rights campaigns. Shortly after her marriage to Robert Terrell (as she described in her autobiography), she considered retiring from activism to settle down. It was Douglass who persuaded her that her talents required her to do otherwise [3].

Terrell was an active member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was particularly concerned about ensuring the organization continued to fight for black woman getting to vote. With Josephine Ruffin, she formed the Federation of Afro-American Woman.

In 1896 Terrell became the first president of the newly formed National Association of Colored Women. The NACW members established day nurseries, kindergartens and helped orphans. In 1896 Mrs. Terrell also founded the National Association of College Women, which later became the National Association of University Women (NAUW).

In 1904 Terrell was invited to speak at the International Congress of Women, held in Berlin, Germany. She was the only black woman at the conference. The Tennessee native received an enthusiastic ovation when she honored the host nation by delivering her address in German. She then proceeded to deliver the speech in French, and concluded with the English version [4].

In 1909, Mary Terrell was one of two Negro woman (Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the other) invited to sign the “Call” and to attend the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), thus becoming a founding member.

As the First World War was winding down, Terrell and her daughter Phyllis joined Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, of the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CUWS), in picketing the White House on issues related to the demobilization of Negro servicemen. A celebrity in both America and Europe, she was a delegate to the International Peace Conference after the end of the First World War. While in England, Terrell stayed with Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Wells.

Mary Church Terrell worked actively in the suffrage movement, which pushed for enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Active in the Republican Party, she was president of the Women's Republican League during Warren G. Harding's 1920 presidential campaign, the first in which all American women were given the right to vote [5].

In 1950 Terrell started what would be a successful fight to integrate eating places in the District of Columbia. In the 1890s when the District Code was written, local integration laws dating to the 1870s were changed. The laws had earlier required all eating-place proprietors to serve any respectable, well-behaved person regardless of color, or face a $1,000 fine and forfeiture of their license. In the 1890s the District of Columbia formalized segregation as did states in the South.

On February 28, 1950, Dr. Terrell and colleagues Clark F. King, Essie Thompson, and Arthur F. Elmer entered segregated Thompson Restaurant. When they were refused service, they promptly filed a lawsuit. Attorney Ringgold Hart argued, on April 1, 1950, that the District laws were unconstitutional and later won the case against restaurant segregation. In the three years pending a decision in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Terrell targeted other restaurants, this time using tactics such as boycotts, picketing, and sit-ins.

Finally, on June 8, 1953, the court ruled that segregated eating places in Washington, DC, were unconstitutional. Terrell continued to participate in picket lines, protesting the segregation of restaurants and theaters, after the age of 80. During her senior years, she succeeded in persuading the local chapter of the American Association of University Women to admit black members.

Mrs. Terrell lived to see the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, holding unconstitutional the segregation of schools by race. She died two months later at the age of 90, on July 24, 1954, a week before the NACW was to hold its annual meeting in Washington. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower paid tribute to Terrell's memory in a letter read to the convention on August 1, writing, "For more than 60 years, her great gifts were dedicated to the betterment of humanity, and she left a truly inspiring record." [6].

Mrs. Terrell's autobiography, published in 1940, was A Colored Woman in a White World. Her house still stands in the LeDroit Park neighborhood in Washington.

[edit] Works

  • "Lynching from a Negro's Point of View" - North American Review (June 1904)
  • A Colored Woman in a White World (1940)

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.827-30
  2. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.829
  3. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.829
  4. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.829
  5. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.829
  6. ^ "Mrs. Eisenhower Lauds Work of Mrs. Terrell," The Charleston Gazette, August 2, 1954, p6

[edit] References

  • "Patient Persistence": The Political and Educational Values of Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell. Margaret Nash University of California at Riverside
  • Washington Post. Restaurant's Right to Bar Negroes Upheld.
  • Washington Post. Assails Mrs. Terrell. June 19, 1904
  • Mary Church Terrell [1]
  • Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) [2]
  • Mary Eliza Church Terrell [3]
  • This article is based in part on a document created by the National Park Service, which is part of the US Government. As such, it is presumed to be in the public domain.