Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell (September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954), daughter of former slaves, was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She became an activist who led several important associations and worked for civil rights and suffrage.

Early life and education

Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, both former slaves. Robert Church was mixed-race and said to be the son of his white master, Charles Church. He reputedly became a self-made millionaire from real-estate investments in Memphis and was married twice. When Terrell was six years old, her parents sent her to the Antioch College Model School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, for her elementary and secondary education. Terrell, known to members of her family as "Mollie," and her brother were born during their father's first marriage, which terminated in divorce. Their half-siblings, Robert, Jr. and Annette, were born during their father's second marriage, to Anna (Wright) Church.

When Terrell majored in classics at Oberlin College, she was an African-American woman among mostly white male students. The freshman class nominated her as class poet, and she was elected to two of the college's literary societies. Terrell 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 to have earned a college degree. Church earned a master's degree from Oberlin in 1888.

Career

Painting of Mary Church Terrell by Betsy Graves Reyneau, 1888-1964

Terrell taught at a black secondary school in Washington, DC, and at Wilberforce College, an historically black college founded by the Methodist Church in Ohio. She studied in Europe for two years, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian.

On October 18, 1891, in Memphis, Terrell married Robert Heberton Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC. The couple met through the M Street School, a top academic high school, where Terrell taught and became principal.

Terrell had three children who died in infancy, but gave birth to a daughter, Phyllis, who survived.^[1] The Terrells later adopted a second daughter, Mary.

Through her father, Terrell 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, she considered retiring from activism to settle down. It was Douglass who persuaded her that her talents required her to do otherwise ^[1].

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. Terrell was also an active member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was particularly concerned that the organization continue fighting for suffrage among black women. With Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin, she formed the Federation of Afro-American Women.

In 1896, Terrell became the first president of the newly formed National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. NACWC members established day nurseries and kindergartens, and helped orphans. Also in 1896, Terrell founded the National Association of College Women, which later became the National Association of University Women (NAUW). The League started a training program and kindergarten before these became included in the Washington public schools. The success of the League's educational initiatives led to her appointment to the District of Columbia Board of Education.

Historians have generally emphasized Terrell's role as an activist and community leader during the Progressive Era. She also had a prosperous career as a journalist (she simply called herself a writer). Using the pen name "Euphemia Kirk," Terrell published in both the black and white press to promote the African American Women's Club Movement (Terrell, 1940). She wrote for a variety of newspapers "published either by or in the interest of colored people (Terrell, 1940, p. 222)," such as the A.M.E. Church Review of Philadelphia, PA; the Southern Workman of Hampton, VA; the Indianapolis Freeman;the Afro-American of Baltimore; the Washington Tribune; the Chicago Defender; the New York Age; the Voice of the Negro; the Women's World; and the Norfolk Journal and Guide (Terrell, 1940). She also contributed to the Washington Evening Star and the Washington Post (Terrell, 1940). She aligned the African-American Women's Club Movement and the overall struggle of black women and the black race for equality. In 1892 she was elected as the first woman president of the prominent Washington DC black debate organization Bethel Literary and Historical Society^[2]

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. Terrell 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 ^[1].

In 1909, Terrell was one of two black woman (Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the other) invited to sign the “Call” and to attend the first organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she became a founding member. In 1913-1914, she helped organize the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. More than a quarter century later, she helped write its creed that set up a code of conduct for black women.

In World War I (WWI), she was involved with the War Camp Community Service, which aided in recreation for and, later, the demobilization of Negro servicemen. As WWI was winding down, Terrell and her daughter Phyllis joined Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, of the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CUWS), to picket the White House on issues related to the demobilization of Negro servicemen and need for jobs. Terrell was a delegate to the International Peace Conference after the end of the war. While in England, Terrell stayed with Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Wells.

Terrell worked actively in the women's 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 and the first election in which all American women were given the right to vote.^[3] In the former Confederacy, Southern states had earlier passed voter registration and election rules that still effectively disfranchised most blacks. Those restrictions were not fully overturned until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

Terrell wrote an autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940).

In 1950 Terrell started what would be a successful fight to integrate eating places in the District of Columbia. In the 1890s the District of Columbia had formalized segregation as did states in the South. Before then, local integration laws dating to the 1870s had 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 1949, Dr. Terrell and colleagues Clark F. King, Essie Thompson, and Arthur F. Elmer entered the segregated Thompson Restaurant. When 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. Her tactics included boycotts, picketing, and sit-ins. Finally, on June 8, 1953, the court ruled that segregated eating places in Washington, DC, were unconstitutional.

After the age of 80, Terrell continued to participate in picket lines, protesting the segregation of restaurants and theaters. During her senior years, she also succeeded in persuading the local chapter of the American Association of University Women to admit black members.

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 in Anne Arundel General Hospital. It was the week before the NACW was to hold its annual meeting, that year at her town of Annapolis, Maryland.

Legacy and honors

• First Lady Mamie Eisenhower paid tribute to Terrell's memory in a letter read to the NACW 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."^[4]
• 1933 - At Oberlin College's centennial celebration, Terrell was recognized among the college's "Top 100 Outstanding Alumni".^[5]
• 1948 - Oberlin awarded Terrell the honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
• 1975 - The Mary Church Terrell house in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington was named a National Historic Landmark.
• In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Mary Church Terrell on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[6]
• 2009- Terrell was among 12 pioneers of civil rights commemorated in a United States Postal Service postage stamp series.^[7]

Works

• "Duty of the National Association of Colored Women to the Race", A. M. E. Church Review (January 1900), 340-354
• "Club Work of Colored Women", Southern Workman, August 8, 1901, 435-438
• "Society Among the COlored People of Washington", Voice of the Negro (April 1904), 150-56
• "Lynching from a Negro's Point of View", North American Review 178 (June 1904), 853-868
• "The Washington Conservatory of Music for Colored People", Voice of the Negro (November 1904), 525-530
• "Purity and the Negro", Light (June 1905), 19-25
• "Paul Lawrence Dunbar", Voice of the Negro (April 1906), 271-277
• "Susan B. Anthony, the Abolitionist", Voice of the Negro (June 1906), 411-16
• "A Plea for the White South by a Colored Woman", Nineteenth Century (July 1906), 70-84
• "What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States", Independent, January 24, 1907, 181-86
• "An Interview with W. T. Stead on the Race Problem", Voice of the Negro (July 1907), 327-330
• "Peonage in the United States: The Convict Lease System and the Chain Gangs", Nineteenth Century 62 (August 1907), 306-322
• "Phyllis Wheatley - An African Genius", Baha'i Magazine: Star of the West 19:7 (October 1928), 221-23
• A Colored Woman in a White World (1940), autobiography
• "I Remember Frederick Douglass", Ebony (1953), 73-80

External Links

• Mary Church Terrell: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Current Biography 1942, pp.829
2. ^ Roberts, Kim (Spring 2010). "The Bethel Literary and Historical Society". Beltway Poetry Quarterly 11 (02). http://washingtonart.com/beltway/bethel.html. Retrieved 04-03-2010. 
3. ^ Current Biography 1942, p.829
4. ^ "Mrs. Eisenhower Lauds Work of Mrs. Terrell," The Charleston Gazette, August 2, 1954, p. 6
5. ^ Current Biography 1942, pp.827-30
6. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
7. ^ [1]

References

• Church, M.T.(1940). A Colored Woman in a White World. Washington, DC: Ransdell, Inc. Publishers.
• Davis, E.L. (1996). Lifting as They Climb. New York: G.K. Hall & Co.
• Johnson, K.A. (2000). Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, New York: Garland Publishing.
• Jones, B.W. (1982). Mary Church Terrell and the National Association of Colored Women: 1986-1901. The Journal of Negro History, 67, 20-33.
• Jones, B.W. (1990). Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell. Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc.
• Margaret Nash, Patient Persistence: The Political and Educational Values of Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell. University of California at Riverside
• Wade-Gayles, G. Black Women Journalists in the South: 1880-1905: An Approach to the Study of Black Women's History. Callaloo, 11, 138-152.
• Washington Post. Restaurant's Right to Bar Negroes Upheld.
• Washington Post. Assails Mrs. Terrell. June 19, 1904
• Mary Church Terrell [2]
• Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) [3]
• Mary Eliza Church Terrell [4]

• 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.

Persondata
Name	Terrell, Mary Church
Alternative names
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Date of birth	September 23, 1863
Place of birth
Date of death	July 24, 1954
Place of death