Mary Church Terrell

For 70 years, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a prominent advocate of African American and women's rights. She traveled around the world speaking about the achievements of African Americans and raising awareness of the conditions in which they lived.

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863, to two recently emancipated slaves. Her father, Robert Reed Church, was the son of a white river boat captain and a black house servant. After settling in Memphis, Robert Church operated a saloon. Mary's mother, Louisa Ayers Church, had been a house servant who was well educated and well treated before her emancipation.

Robert and Louisa Church were both light-skinned African American blacks who lived a comfortable life in a white neighborhood outside Memphis where Louisa operated a successful hair salon. Mary, known as Mollie, had a brother four years younger. She grew up with white friends and knew little about the condition in which most African American people lived until she was about five years old. When her maternal grandmother, a former house slave, told her stories about the brutality of slave owners, Terrell began to understand the history of African Americans. In her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, Terrell described how she cried when she heard her grandmother's stories and her grandmother comforted her, saying, "Never mind, honey. Gramma ain't a slave no more."

Robert and Louisa Church divorced when Mary was very young and Louisa moved north to New York where she opened another, equally successful, hair salon. Because educational opportunities for African American children were poor in Memphis, Terrell was sent north to live with her mother when she was six years old. Terrell was one of only a handful of African American children in the school she now attended, and she was sometimes ridiculed because of her race. When studying the Emancipation Proclamation, a fellow student made a rude remark to Terrell. In her autobiography she described her reaction: "I resolved that so far as this descendant of slaves was concerned, she would show those white girls and boys whose forefathers had always been free that she was their equal in every respect… . I felt I must hold high the banner of my race."

Terrell eventually attended Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, and from there enrolled at Oberlin College where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1884. After graduating she returned to Memphis, where her father had remarried. By this time, Robert Church had become very wealthy. In 1879 Memphis experienced a yellow fever epidemic, causing residents to evacuate the city in a panic, selling their properly for next to nothing as they fled. Robert Church invested all of his money in real estate during the evacuation and within a few years he was a millionaire.

Began Teaching Career

Robert Church was opposed to his daughter working; he wished her to remain in Memphis and marry. But Terrell was restless; she had been looking forward to a teaching career and promoting the welfare of her race. After a year in Memphis she returned to the Midwest, taking a teaching job at Wilberforce University, near Xenia, Ohio. Her father was incensed that she had defied his wishes and for a time he refused to communicate with her.

In 1887 Terrell moved to Washington, D.C. where she taught Latin at the M Street Colored High School. After a year, her father, with whom she had by now reconciled, sent her to study in Europe. She spent two years traveling in France, Germany, and Italy, countries free from racial discrimination. She considered staying in Europe, but said in her autobiography, "I knew I would be much happier trying to promote the welfare of my race in my native land, working under certain hard conditions, than I would be living in a foreign land where I could enjoy freedom from prejudice, but where I would make no effort to do the work which I then believed it was my duty to do."

Terrell returned to the M Street School, where she was reunited with her supervisor, Robert Heberton Terrell. Robert Terrell was one of the first African Americans to graduate from Harvard University, and he had paid court to Terrell before her trip to Europe. In 1891 the two were married, and they made their new home in Washington, D.C. Marriage marked the end of Terrell's teaching career, since married women did not work. Robert Terrell attended law school at night and left teaching to work as an attorney and eventually became the first African American municipal judge in the nation's capitol city.

The first few years of the Terrells' marriage were marked by illness and disappointment. Mary Terrell was often sick and within five years had lost three babies shortly after their birth. Her fourth child, a girl named Phyllis, was born healthy in 1898. The couple adopted Mary's ten-year-old niece, also named Mary, in 1905.

Raised Awareness of Discrimination

Terrell devoted her life to improving the lives of African Americans and especially women. Her public service began when she was appointed to the Washington, D.C. school board. The first African American woman on the board, she served from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911.

Terrell and her husband were both advocates of women's suffrage. Terrell often marched for women's rights in front of the White House and Capitol Hill. At meetings of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a group led by suffragist Susan B. Anthony, Terrell encouraged the group to include African American women in their agenda. In 1898 Anthony invited Terrell to address the group on "The Progress and Problems of Colored Women." A few years later she spoke again, this time without regard to race, on "The Justice of Woman Suffrage." Terrell soon earned a reputation as an effective speaker and activist.

After passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote, the Republican Party named Terrell director of Colored Women of the East. She organized efforts in eastern states encouraging women to use their right to vote.

Advocating on behalf of African American women led Terrell to found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. She served two terms as the group's president and then was named honorary president for life. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Terrell's oratory skills earned her a position as a professional lecturer for Slayton Lyceum Bureau. She traveled throughout the south and east speaking of the achievements of African American women and advocating for justice and education for African Americans and people of color around the world. Terrell was surprised at how little white people knew about the conditions in which African Americans lived, and she worked to raise awareness of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and lynching. She also wrote numerous magazine and newspaper articles highlighting civil rights issues.

On The Road

It was not easy or safe for a African American woman to travel alone in the South during the early 20th century. Terrell was light skinned and was sometimes mistaken for a white person. Although she did not advocate African American people crossing "the color line" and living as white, she did not draw attention to her race if she could get away with using white accommodations. When she was recognized as African American, she was prohibited from eating in restaurants, traveling in Pullman cars, or staying in most hotels. She described many examples of such discrimination in her autobiography.

Despite her political activism, Terrell was devoted to her children and never left home for more then three weeks at a time. Her mother lived with her family for 15 years and cared for the children when Terrell was away. Daughters Phyllis and Mary both graduated from college and became teachers. Daughter Mary was a musician as well.

Terrell's speaking engagements took her abroad for the first time in 1904, when she spoke at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, Germany. Her speech raised awareness in Europe of the race problem in America. She spoke at the International Congress of Women again following World War I in 1919. Although the conference included women from around the world, Terrell was the only woman of color in attendance. She felt that she represented not only the United States, but all the non-white countries of the world. In her speech she emphasized the importance of justice and fairness for people of color, stressing that a lasting peace will never come to pass while inequality exists among the races.

Elderly Activist

Robert Terrell suffered a stroke in 1921 and died four years later. Terrell was 62 years old when she was widowed. Six years later she fell in love again, but because the man was married the relationship ended. In 1937, when Terrell was aged 73, her brother died, leaving her to raise her ten-year-old nephew, Thomas Church.

In 1940 the 77-year-old activist's autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, was published. The book describes Terell's childhood, education, and her years of travel and advocacy on behalf of African American rights. Terrell described the prejudice she encountered in restaurants, hotels, theaters, education, employment, while buying a home - virtually every aspect of her life. She described times when, weak with hunger, she had to pass by restaurants in Washington, D.C. because they did not serve African American people. She recounted how she was offered jobs or club memberships, only to have the offers revoked when it was discovered that she was African American. While Terrell intended the book to be a forthright account of the prejudice she had experienced, the autobiography described events in polite terms and was less critical of American society than she perhaps intended. In contrast, her diaries reveal a more emotional response to the treatment she had endured.

As she aged Terrell became more forceful in her fight for civil rights. She appeared before the U.S. Congress to urge passage of an anti-lynching bill. In 1946 she applied for membership in the American Association of University Women. When her application was rejected, she appealed and after three years the board finally voted to admit African American women.

In 1949, when she was 86 years old, Terrell was invited to be honorary chairperson of the coordinating committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Law in Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia had on its books 1872 and 1873 laws prohibiting exclusion of African American people from restaurants, theaters, and other public places, although these statutes had never been enforced. In fact, they had been illegally deleted from the District Code in the 1890s. Terrell, not satisfied with being honorary chair, became the group's working chairperson. She presided over meetings, spoke at rallies, and on January 7, 1950, led a group of four African American people to Thompson's cafeteria, located two blocks from the White House. Terrell and her companions put soup on their trays and sat down to eat. They were asked to leave, prompting the committee to file a lawsuit charging the restaurant with violating their civil rights.

While the suit dragged through the courts, Terrell and her group met with restaurant and store owners trying to convince them to open their lunch counters to everyone. Some businesses complied, but many more remained closed to African Americans. Terrell encouraged boycotts and picketed the holdouts. For two years Terrell, now aged and stooped, led the picket line day after day, in all kinds of weather. In Black Foremothers: Three Lives, a younger picketer is quoted as recalling: "When my feet hurt I wasn't going to let a women fifty years older than I do what I couldn't do. I kept on picketing." One by one, the restaurants gave in and on June 8, 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Terrell's favor.

Terrell continued to fight battles on behalf of her race until her death. Her 90th birthday was marked by a party for 700 people and included a White House reception. Addressing the gathering, she pledged to see an end to racial discrimination within Washington, D.C. by the time she reached 100 years of age. Her wish would not be granted, however; a few months later, on July 24, 1954, Terrell died of cancer at her summer home in Highland Beach, Maryland. Her body lay in state in the headquarters building of the National Association of Colored Women, which she had co-founded nearly 60 years earlier. Thousands paid their respects.

Books

Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, Belknap Press, 1980.

Sterling, Dorothy, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, Feminist Press, 1988.

Terrell, Mary Church, A Colored Woman in a White World, Ransdell Inc., 1940.

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, Anne Commire, editor, Yorkin Publications, 1999.

activist; educator

Personal Information

Born Mary Eliza Church, September 23, 1863, in Memphis, TN; died July 24, 1954; daughter of Robert Reed and Louisa (Ayers) Church; married Robert Terrell (an educator, lawyer, and municipal court judge), October, 1891; children: Phyllis, Terrell Church (adopted).
Education: Oberlin College, B.A., 1884, M.A., 1888.
Politics: Republican.
Memberships: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; charter member), Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Bethel Literary and Historical Association.

Career

Wilberforce College, Ohio, instructor, 1885-86; Colored High School, Washington, DC, Latin teacher, 1886-88; Colored Women's League, Washington, DC, founder and president, 1892-96; National Association of Colored Women, founder and president, 1896-1904, honorary president for life, 1904-54. Lecturer on social and racial issues in America and Europe, 1892-54; member of Board of Education of Washington, DC, 1895-1901, 1906-11; chair of Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1949.

Life's Work

Mary Church Terrell, a lecturer, political activist, and educator, dedicated her life to improving social conditions for black American women. Terrell's long life spanned the worst decades of segregation in the United States, during which she was a tireless worker against such unfair laws as the discriminatory Jim Crow legislation. She helped to found two of the most important black political action groups, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She fought for women's suffrage and for integration in public education and lived just long enough to see her efforts bear fruit both in her home city of Washington, DC and the nation at large.

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863. Earlier that year, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing black Americans from slavery. Both of her parents were former slaves who had moved to Memphis in search of employment. Creating a financially stable, religious, and conservative household, Mary's parents wanted their intelligent and personable daughter to receive a better education than the segregated schools in Memphis might provide.

Toward that end, the Churches sent six-year-old Mary north to Yellow Springs, Ohio. There she attended the Antioch College Model School, and was often the only black youngster in her classes. She boarded with a local black family, the Hunsters, and gradually began considering them a second set of parents. After two years at the Model School, she switched to the local public schools. She finished her high school education at a public school in Oberlin, Ohio, graduating in 1879.

Mary was accepted at Oberlin College--at the time, one of the few integrated universities in the United States. Most of the women at the college in those days pursued a two-year curriculum especially for "ladies." Mary had other ideas. She threw herself into the classes for the four-year "gentleman's course" in preparation for a serious career. She earned good grades in a course of classical studies and managed to find time for numerous extracurricular activities as well. Earning a bachelor's degree in 1884, she immediately announced her intentions of pursuing a master's degree.

Mary's parents--especially her father--wanted her to follow the conventional pattern of marriage and family. Even while in

her twenties, a time when women's employment outside the home was widely viewed with disdain, Mary wanted to work. In 1885 she accepted a teaching position at Wilberforce College in Ohio. Her father was furious, and his anger tore a rift in the family that took some years to heal. Mary had little time to brood on the estrangement. At Wilberforce she taught five different classes and served as college secretary, while simultaneously working toward a master's degree at Oberlin.

In 1886 Mary accepted a position at the Colored High School in Washington, DC. She taught Latin under the direction of Robert Heberton Terrell, a graduate of Harvard University. The professional relationship between the two young teachers gradually became more personal, withstanding long periods of separation. After earning her master's degree in 1888, Mary spent two years traveling and studying in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and England. It was only when she returned from her long stay abroad that she set a date to marry Robert Terrell.

Mary Church and Robert Terrell married in a lavish wedding ceremony in Memphis in October of 1891. She was well aware that her marriage would prove the end to her professional career--married women were not allowed to teach most places in the United States at that time. The decision was made doubly poignant when she was offered the important job of registrar at her alma mater, Oberlin. Nevertheless, Terrell returned to Washington, DC with her husband, planning to become a homemaker. Her only child, a daughter named Phyllis, was born in 1898, and the family adopted a niece named Terrell Church in 1905.

At the turn of the century, a motivated woman who was not a wage-earner could work just as hard for any number of charitable or political causes. While Robert Terrell advanced from a career in education to a law firm, and later to a seat on the District of Columbia Municipal Court bench, his wife began dabbling in politics. The event that drove Mary Terrell back into public life was the 1892 lynching of a friend from Memphis, Tom Moss, who was murdered by whites jealous of the success of his grocery store.

Lynching of innocent blacks--especially men--was frequent in the South, and it occurred in the North as well. Terrell mounted a campaign against lynching that eventually led her, accompanied by former slave Frederick Douglass, to the White House. Together, Terrell and Douglass urged President Benjamin Harrison to speak out against racial violence. The president never did as they asked.

Benjamin Harrison could easily afford to ignore Mary Church Terrell. She was a woman, after all, and women could not vote. This fact was yet another indignity that struck Terrell as blatantly unfair. As she sought to organize an association of black women, she also joined the women's suffrage or voting rights movement, uniting her causes of racial equality and gender equality in one appeal.

In 1892 Terrell became the leader of a local Washington, DC club called the Colored Women's League. Within a few years the group merged with other black women's organizations to become the National Association of Colored Women. Terrell was elected the first president of this national society and went on to serve three terms before being named honorary president for life. The NACW tackled an aggressive agenda of social reform, establishing day care centers for children of black working mothers and campaigning for female suffrage, equal rights for blacks, a repeal of Jim Crow legislation, and improved working conditions for black women.

Terrell, who had thought her professional career was finished, suddenly found herself in the national spotlight, a friend and confidante to Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Susan B. Anthony. Terrell became a lecturer of international renown, delivering speeches and publishing articles on black issues and women's suffrage in the United States and Europe.

As the 1890s progressed and her fame grew, Terrell was recruited by the Slayton Lyceum Bureau to be a professional lecturer. Her travels were only limited by her obligations at home, but even there she performed many important tasks. In 1895 she was elected to the Washington, DC Board of Education, the first black female to serve in that capacity. Living in the nation's capital also afforded Terrell ample opportunity to march and demonstrate for women's suffrage in front of the White House and the Capitol Building.

Terrell's status among black women ensured that her opinions and support would be sought when a new national organization for black people was founded in 1901. At the invitation of W. E. B. DuBois, Terrell became a charter member of the NAACP and continued her membership throughout the rest of her life. She also became active in Republican politics, especially after women were granted the right to vote. In 1920 she was asked to supervise all campaign efforts among black women in the East, a task that led to further lecturing and organization-building.

Blessed with good health and a stable home life, Terrell worked for the cause of black civil rights with few interruptions through several decades. In 1940, Terrell published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, a work that used her own more than 70 years of life as an example of the difficulties blacks faced in a predominantly white society. By that time Terrell was considered an important elder stateswoman in the civil rights and women's rights struggles. She had received honorary doctorates from Howard University and Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and had been named one of the 100 most successful students to graduate from Oberlin.

During the last decade of her life Terrell dedicated herself to ending discrimination in public places in her home city of Washington, DC. In 1949 she was elected chairperson of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws. The district had anti-discrimination laws on the books, but segregated public facilities were common. Although nearly 90 years old at the time, Terrell led demonstrations in front of local restaurants and, finally, was part of a small group that sued a particular eating establishment that refused to serve them. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Terrell testified there as one of the litigants. The case was won in 1953, and the nation's capital began desegregating.

Terrell lived just long enough to learn of the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which effectively ended segregation in public schools, a crusade Terrell had pursued herself for years. She died on July 24, 1954, and was buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Washington, DC. By virtue of her long dedication to the causes of equal rights and quality public education, she was honored by having a school named after her in the District of Columbia. Her home is also preserved as a historic landmark.

Terrell's dedication to important national causes helped to galvanize support for equal rights among women of all races and economic levels. Hers was a "long and notable life," according to Debra Newman Ham in Epic Lives, consumed by the need to "improve the social, economic, and political conditions of black Americans." During a time when most black American women were consigned to the lowest rungs of the social ladder, Mary Church Terrell demonstrated what an educated, thoughtful, and articulate citizen could accomplish, both in her own backyard and in the wider world.

Awards

Honorary degrees from Howard University, Wilberforce College, and Oberlin College.

Works

Writings

• A Colored Woman in a White World, Ransdell, 1940, reprinted, Arno Press, 1980.

Further Reading

Sources

• Giddings, Paula, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, Morrow, 1984.
• Jones, Beverly Washington, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Church Terrell, Carlson Publishers, 1990.
• Salley, Columbus, editor, The Black 100, Citadel Press, 1993.
• Shepperd, Gladys B., Mary Church Terrell--Respectable Person, Human Relations Press, 1959.
• Smith, Jessie Carney, editor, Epic Lives, Visible Ink Press, 1993, pp. 509-528.

— Anne Janette Johnson

Mary Eliza Church Terrell was an influential African American writer, lecturer, and social activist, whose work began when the separate-but-equal doctrine of racial segregation was adopted by the U.S. legal system and ended as the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), rejected the doctrine of state-sponsored segregation. Terrell was also an advocate of women's rights, including the right to vote.

Mary Church was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee. She was raised in a middle-class family and attended Oberlin College in Ohio, graduating in 1884. She taught at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, in 1885 and at a secondary school in Washington, D.C., in 1886 before taking a two-year tour of Europe. In 1888 she obtained a master's degree from Oberlin and married Robert Heberton Terrell, an attorney who would become the first African American municipal judge in Washington, D.C.

Terrell became an active member of the National American Suffrage Association and focused her attention on the special concerns of African American women. In her 1896 pamphlet, "The Progress of Colored Women," Terrell noted the "almost insurmountable obstacles" that had confronted African American women. Not only were "colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are everywhere baffled and mocked on account of their race."

In 1896 Terrell founded the National Association of Colored Women and established its headquarters in Washington, D.C. As the first president, Terrell used the association as a means of achieving educational and social reform and bringing an end to racial and sex discrimination. She was appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education in 1895, the first African American woman to hold such a position.

Terrell became a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and continued her civil rights crusade through the 1950s. She worked for the end of racial segregation and other barriers that affected the rights of African Americans. In 1949 Terrell was admitted to the Washington chapter of the American Association of University Women, ending the association's all-white membership policy. In 1950, at age eighty-seven, Terrell began a campaign to end segregation in restaurants and hotels in Washington, D.C. Three years later she achieved her goal.

Terrell published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, in 1940. She died on July 24, 1954, in Annapolis, Maryland.

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 off of real-estate investments in Memphis, and was said to be the son of his white master, Charles Church.

Mary Church majored in classics at Oberlin College, an African-American woman in a student body that was composed primarily of white men. She was elected class poet of the freshman class, elected to two of the college's literary societies, and 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. She attained her master's degree from Oberlin in 1888. During the centennial celebration at Oberlin College in 1933, Mary was recognized as one of the schools one hundred outstanding alumni ^[1].

In 1948, Oberlin conferred upon her the honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. She taught at a black secondary school in Washington and at Wilberforce College in Ohio. She studied in Europe for two years, becoming fluent in French, German, and Italian. She married Robert Heberton Terrell on October 18, 1891 in Memphis. Robert was a lawyer who was later to become the first black municipal court judge in Washington. He also taught school and became a principal. After her first three children died in infancy, the Terrell gave birth to a daughter, Phyllis ^[2]. The Terrells later adopted a second daughter, Mary . As a high school teacher and principal, 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 on the National American Woman Suffrage Association and 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 and in 1896 she 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, and 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 1908, she became the first black woman in the United States to earn an appointment to a public school board. In 1909, Mary was one of two Negro woman (Ida B. Wells-Barnett was the other and both were former Memphians) invited to sign the “Call” and to be present at the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, thus becoming a founding member of the NAACP.

During the First World War, 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 the matter of 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, she stayed with Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Wells. She worked 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].

She led the successful fight to integrate eating places in the District of Columbia. Local integration laws dating back to 1872 had disappeared in the 1890s when the District Code was written. The laws 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. Clark F. King, Dr. Mary Church Terrell, Essie Thompson, and Arthur F. Elmer were refused service at a local restaurant.

Terrell launched a campaign to reinstate these anti-discrimination laws. On February 28, 1950, she and several colleagues entered segregated Thompson Restaurant. When they were refused service, they promptly filed a lawsuit. Attorney Ringgold Hart argued, on April 1, 1950, that the acts 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 theatres, 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 unconsitutional 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 in LeDroit Park still stands.

Works

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

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]

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