Mary Church Terell

Terell, Mary Church (1863–1954), suffragist, humanitarian, and activist for racial equality and women's rights. An articulate lecturer and writer, Mary Church Terrell fought to end lynching, disenfranchise-ment, employment discrimination, public segregation, and other injustices. Over her long career Terrell's activism evolved from “Woman's Era” refinement to direct action, militant tactics involving picketing, sit-ins, and boycotts. In her late eighties she organized and led demonstrations against Washington, D.C., restaurants that refused to serve blacks. One such effort culminated in the famous Thompson Restaurant case and the 1953 Supreme Court ruling that opened Washington, D.C., eating establishments to all races.

The daughter of former slaves, Terrell was born in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father, Robert Reed Church, was a prominent Memphis businessman and the first black millionaire in the South. Nicknamed Mollie, Mary Church Terrell graduated in 1884 from Oberlin College where she followed the “gentlemen's course,” studying Latin and Greek and earning a BA degree rather than the two-year certificate women normally acquired. She taught at Wilberforce University and Washington, D.C.'s Colored High School before marrying Robert Terrell, a teacher, lawyer, and district court judge, in 1891. Terrell gave birth to four children, but only a daughter, Phyllis (named for Phillis Wheatley), survived.

During the late nineteenth century, Terrell was one of the best-educated black women in America. In 1895 she was appointed to the Washington, D.C., board of education, becoming the first African American woman in the country to hold such a position. Terrell was also a founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women and an early organizer of the NAACP. In 1904 she addressed the International Council of Women in Berlin on the race problem in the United States, delivering speeches in both French and German.

Terrell fought tirelessly for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and later became involved in Republican politics. Although she admired Eleanor Roosevelt, Terrell never supported Franklin Roosevelt. In the 1940s, Terrell received doctor of letters degrees from Oberlin, Wilberforce, and Howard, but she was denied membership in the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She appealed to the AAUW's national board, and in 1949 the association admitted Terrell and voted to admit other minority women as well.

A prolific writer, Terrell published articles in over thirty newspapers, magazines, and journals. Her works focused on racial and social injustices, African American life and history, and such notable personages as Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, George Washington Carver, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Susan B. Anthony. In 1940 Terrell published A Colored Woman in a White World, an ambitious, full-length autobiography chronicling her struggles against racial and sexual discrimination. While Terrell's writings have been criticized for failing to grasp the full complexity of the racial struggle in America, they served to boost the morale of African Americans, call attention to important social issues, and educate whites about black life.

Bibliography

• Dorothy Sterling, “Mary Church Terrell,” in Black Foremothers, 1979, pp. 118–157.
• Beverly Washington Jones, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–1954, 1990

Paula Gallant Eckard