Mary Church Terrell
Mary "Mollie" Eliza Church Terrell was an American civil rights activist, journalist, teacher and one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street School —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Colored Women's League of Washington. She helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its first national president, and she was a founding member of the National Association of College Women. She was a pioneering African American civil rights activist, educator, and suffragist who championed racial and gender equality throughout her life.
Early life and education
Mary Church was born September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayres, both freed slaves of mixed racial ancestry. They were the offspring of enslaved women and white slaveowners; neither was set free until the Civil War's conclusion. After the Civil War, Louisa opened a store selling wigs and hair extensions, which gave the family financial security. Robert opened a saloon; when he was denied a license due to his race, he successfully sued the State of Tennessee for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1866. After the Memphis massacre of 1866 and yellow fever epidemic of 1878, he bought property around Beale Street becoming one of the first black millionaires in the American South and an influential member of the Republican party. In the midst of national adversity, the Terrell family became a part of a rising upper class in the United States.Robert and Louisa divorced in 1874, and Louisa moved from Memphis to New York City. Mary Church and her little brother lived with their mother following the divorce. The court's ruling was likely influenced by Robert's public violence, the fact that he operated a tavern, and Louisa's evidence about his temper issues at home. Church's father was married three times. His first marriage was to Margaret Pico Church from 1857 to 1862, with whom he had a daughter named Laura. Robert then married Louisa Ayers in 1862. Mary and her brother Thomas Ayres Church were both products of this marriage. Their half-siblings, Robert, Jr. and Annette, were born to Robert Sr.'s third wife, Anna Wright.
In 1871, when Mary Church was 8 years old, her parents sent her to Antioch College's Model School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and hired a tutor to teach her German. In 1875, her parents moved her to Oberlin, Ohio, where she attended Oberlin public school from eighth grade through high school. She graduated in 1879, when she was 15. Church then attended Oberlin College. Earning her degree made her among the earliest African American women to earn a college degree. Terrell's class position and ability to earn a degree gave her the ability to fight against racial discrimination, giving a voice to the voiceless. She enrolled in the four-year "gentleman's course" instead of the expected two-year ladies' course, despite being warned that the course was difficult and that being overeducated would make it hard to find a husband. In the gentleman's course, she learned Latin and Greek. At Oberlin, Church was elected freshman-class poet, edited the college newspaper, and participated in the Aeolian women's club. While most of her classmates were white and she experienced occasional racial discrimination, she considered herself popular and felt her high social class carried more weight than her race. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884, graduating alongside Anna J. Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt; the three activists would become lifelong colleagues. In 1888, she earned a Master of Arts. She also studied abroad in Europe for two years. Terrell's class position and ability to earn a degree gave her the ability to fight against racial discrimination, giving a voice to the voiceless.
Career
Mary Church began her career in education in 1885, teaching modern languages at Wilberforce University. After two years of teaching in Ohio, she moved to Washington, D.C., to teach Latin at M Street High School. She took a leave of absence from teaching in 1888 to travel and study in Europe for two years, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian. In 1881, Oberlin College offered her a registrarship position, which would have made her the first African-American women with such position, but she declined. When she married Robert "Berto" Heberton Terrell in 1891, she was forced to resign from her position at the M Street School where her husband also taught. In 1895, she was appointed superintendent by the Washington, D.C., school board, the first woman to hold the post.Upon returning to the United States, Church shifted her attention from teaching to social activism, focusing especially on the empowerment of African-American women. She also wrote prolifically, including an autobiography, and her writing was published in several journals. "Lynching from a Negro's Point of View," published in 1904, is included in Terrell's long list of published work where she attempts to dismantle the skewed narrative of why Black men are targeted for lynching and she presents numerous facts to support her claims.
Terrell's autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, recounts her personal experiences with racism. Terrell began writing in 1925, which she self-published 15 years later at the age of 78.
Activism
Black women's clubs and the National Association of Colored Women
In 1892, Terrell, along with Helen Appo Cook, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna J. Cooper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Jane Patterson and Evelyn Shaw, formed the Colored Women's League in Washington, D.C. The goals of the service-oriented club were to promote unity, social progress, and the best interests of the African American community. Cook was elected president. The Colored Women's League aided in elevating the lives of educated African-American women. It also started a training program and kindergarten, before these were included in the Washington, DC public schools. Combined with her achievements as a principal, the success of the League's educational initiatives led to Terrell's appointment to the District of Columbia Board of Education which she held from 1895 to 1906. She was the first African-American woman to hold such a position.Around the same time, another group of progressive African-American women were gathering in Boston, Massachusetts under the direction of suffragist and intellectual Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin under the name Federation of Afro-American Women. As both organizations had similar ambitions and audiences, they combined their efforts with hundreds of other organizations to reach a wider focus of African-American women workers, students and activists nearing the beginning of the 20th century. Out of this union formed the National Association of Colored Women, which became the first secular national organization dedicated to the livelihoods of African-American women. Black women from the middle class and upper class felt it was their duty to demonstrate what black women could be, do, and accomplish in the early 1890s. With Mollie Church Terrell serving as its first president, they established the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 in the hopes of gaining a national voice to advance the welfare of all African Americans. The NACW's motto was "Lifting as we climb" and they aimed to create solidarity among Black women while combating racial discrimination. Among other initiatives, members created day nurseries and kindergartens for Black children. Terrell was twice elected president, serving from 1896 to 1901. After declining a third re-election, she was named honorary president of the Association.
In 1910, Terrell founded the College Alumnae Club, which later became the National Association of University Women. The League started a training program and kindergarten before being included in the Washington, DC public school system.
Fighting for Black women's suffrage
Having been an avid suffragist during her years as an Oberlin student, Terrell continued to be active in the happenings within suffragist circles in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Through these meetings she became associated with Susan B. Anthony, an association which Terrell describes in her biography as "delightful, helpful friendship," which lasted until Anthony's death in 1906. Terrell also came to know Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1893 around the same time she met Susan B. Anthony. What grew out of Terrell's association with NAWSA was a desire to create a formal organizing group among African-American women to tackle issues of lynching, the disenfranchisement of the race, and the development of educational reform. As one of the few African-American women who was allowed to attend NAWSA's meetings, Terrell spoke directly about the injustices and issues within the African-American community.On February 18, 1898, Terrell gave an address titled "The Progress of Colored Women" at the National American Woman Suffrage Association biennial session in Washington, D.C. This speech was a call of action for NAWSA to fight for the lives of Black women. It was also during this session that Terrell addressed the "double burden" African American women were facing. Terrell believed that, when compared to Euro-American women, African American women had to overcome not only their sex, but race as well. The speech received great reception from the Association and African-American news outlets, ultimately leading Terrell to be invited back as an unofficial African-American ambassador for the Association. Though many African-American women were concerned and involved in the fight for American women's right to vote, the NAWSA did not allow African-American women to create their own chapter within the organization. Terrell went on to give more addresses, such as "In Union There is Strength", which discussed the need for unity among African-American people, and "What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the U.S.", in which she discussed her own personal struggles that she faced as an African American woman in Washington, D.C. Terrell also addressed the Seneca Falls Historical Society in 1908 and praised the work of woman suffragists who were fighting for all races and genders alongside their primary causes. Terrell's life work was centered on the concept of racial uplift, which held that Black Americans could help end racial prejudice by progressing themselves and other members of the race through education, work, and community action.
In her autobiography, A Colored Woman In A White World, Terrell recalls how she was able to navigate her college years at the predominantly White-attended Oberlin with a sense of ease due to her racial ambiguity. She never passed as White at Oberlin, which was founded by abolitionists and accepted both Euro-American and African-American students even before the Civil War. In fact, her gender made her stand out more in her predominantly male classes. Her gender distinguished her more than her race at Oberlin, as most of her classmates in the classical program were men. In subsequent years, it can be noted that she understood her mobility as a Euro-American-passing African-American woman as necessary to creating greater links between African-Americans and Euro-American Americans, thus leading her to become an active voice in NAWSA. "Lifting as we climb” became the motto of the NACW, tying to her ideology of racial uplift to end racial discrimination.
In 1913, Alice Paul organized a NAWSA suffrage rally where she initially planned to exclude Black suffragists and later relegated them to the back of the parade in order to curry favor with Southern Euro-American women. However, Terrell and Ida B. Wells fought to integrate the march. Terrell marched with the delegation from New York City, while the Delta Sigma Theta sorority women of Howard University, whom Terrell mentored, marched with the other college women.
Active in the Republican Party, she was appointed director of Work among African-American Women of the East by the Republican National Committee for Warren G. Harding's 1920 presidential campaign during the first election in which American women won the right to vote. The Southern states from 1890 to 1908 passed voter registration and election laws that disenfranchised African-Americans of their right to vote. These restrictions were not fully overturned until after Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.