Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell was born to a Black upper-middle class family. Church Terrell’s parents were former slaves of mixed race, and her father, who worked in real estate, was one of the first Black millionaires in the South.

[Image courtesy of Oberlin College Archives]

“During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the U.S. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. “Terror lynchings” peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.” – Lynching in America, the Equal Justice Initiative

[Image courtesy of National Archives]

Church Terrell became one of the first African American women to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree when she graduated from Oberlin College. In 1835, Oberlin College became the first predominantly white collegiate institution to admit African American male students and in 1837, it became the first coeducational college in the country, opening its doors to all women. The town of Oberlin in Ohio was also a part of the Underground Railroad, and provided refuge for fugitive slaves bound for Canada.  

[Image courtesy of Oberlin College Archives]

Church Terrell taught classical languages at Wilberforce University in Ohio, one of the nation’s first Black colleges.

[Image courtesy of National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center]

Mary Church Terrell taught Latin at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., one of the first public high schools in the country for African Americans, founded in 1870.  The school changed names many times before it was finally named Dunbar High School in 1916, after poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was then renamed the Perry School, until the integration of the school system in 1954. M Street High School now operates as the Perry School Community Services Center, Inc, addressing issues of chronic poverty in the area around North Capitol Street.

[Image courtesy of Chicago Review Press]

Mary Church married Robert H. Terrell, who at the time was the chair of the language department at M Street High School. He became the first African American judge in Washington, D.C., in 1910, and served until his death in 1925. While serving as municipal judge, he was also on the faculty of the Howard University Law School. 

The lynching of Thomas Moss took place in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 9, 1892. A mob of white men killed Thomas Moss, as well as Will Stewart and Calvin McDowellwhite, because their grocery business was successful and was perceived as competition for a local white grocer. The three men were arrested and jailed, and three days later were dragged out by a mob to a rail yard, where they were shot and killed, their bodies left under a pile of brush. Moss’ final words were, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.” 

This tragic event deeply affected Church Terrell, and was a pivotal moment her, sparking her activism and work in the anti-lynching movement. In her memoir, A Colored Woman in a White World, she stated, “Tom Moss, who left a wife and several children, and two others were murdered, because they were succeeding too well. They were guilty of no crime but that,” and declared she would respond in her own work to “this awful tide of barbarism which threatens the whole land.” 

[Image courtesy of The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche]

In 1894, Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper founded the Colored Women’s League, whose mission was to “promote the intellectual, social and moral accomplishments of African Americans” and focused on improving education for African Americans. 

Black women had formed their own clubs around the country, as they were not allowed to become members of organizations of white women. These clubs were a parallel to the settlement movement, in that they provided support to social causes and community betterment. The Colored Women’s League was an attempt to bring the loose network of Black women’s clubs together as a national organization.

[Image courtesy of Shades of L.A. Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library]

In 1896, The Colored Women’s League merged with the National Federation of Afro-American Women to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).  Church Terrell coined the organization’s motto, “Lifting As We Climb,” and served as its president from 1896 to 1901. 

[Image courtesy of National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institute]

At the two-week gathering in Berlin, Church Terrell shared her views about African American women. She gave the address in French, German, and English. 

[Image courtesy of University of Iowa Libraries]

[Image courtesy of The American Review]

During her 3-week speaking tour in the Midwest, Justice David Brewer introduced Mary Church Terrell at the Pilgrim Church in Cleveland, calling her “the leading woman” of her race.

[Image courtesy of Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives]

The NAACP was created in by members W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Mary White Ovington, and others, in response to the violence and discrimination facing African Americans in the early 20th century. Some of the founding members had been associated with the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group led by DuBois. The NAACP’s mission was and is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate race prejudice. 

In 1910 the NAACP began publishing a quarterly magazine called The Crisis, edited by Du Bois for the first 24 years. Many of the NAACP’s actions have focused on national issues; including convincing Woodrow Wilson to denounce lynching in 1918, and political action to secure enactment of civil rights laws. In 1939, the NAACP established as an independent legal arm for the civil rights movement, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which litigated to the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the case that resulted in the high court’s landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision. 

[Image courtesy of the Library of Congress]

The 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade  was the first suffragist parade in Washington, D.C., and was organized by the suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns for the National American Woman Suffrage Association.Church Terrell and other African American suffragists were forced to march in the segregated section at the back. Church Terrell marched with young women who were members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University.

[Image courtesy of the Library of Congress]

After decades of protest and activism for suffrage rights, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote. African American women, as African American men had been, continued to be restricted from voting through racist tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as violence. It wasn’t until the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed that the law prohibited states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding African Americans from voting

[Image courtesy of the Boston Globe]

The 1922 Silent March was likely the first peaceful march for civil rights in Washington, D.C., 5,000 African-Americans marched in silence past the White House and the U.S. Senate building to denounce lynching and to demand a federal anti-lynching law.

[Image courtesy of GETTY]

The Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. J.R. Thompson’s Co. Inc., which Church Terrell pursued with the Anti-Disrimination Committee, outlawed segregation in the capitol’s restaurants. Theaters in the capitol soon followed, and the case helped usher in school integration, paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education. 

[Image courtesy of Oberlin College Archives]

Mary Church Terrell died of cancer at the age of 91.

[Image courtesy of Library of Congress]

The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, brought nationwide attention to  racial violence and injustice. Till was brutally murdered by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman, a charge that she later recanted. His mother’s decision to have an open casket funeral to show the savagery of the murder of her teenage son was a catalyst for a generation of African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement. 

[Image courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University Libraries] 

On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. was walking with a friend on a street in St. Louis, when a white police officer confronted Brown, and shot and killed Brown, who was unarmed.  

Sustained protests against the murder and police violence took place throughout Ferguson, Missouri. In response, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and called the National Guard. 

[Image courtesy of Elcardo Anthony]

On November 8, 2014, the Ferguson Commission was created. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon appointed 16 people to the Ferguson Commission, an independent panel charged with examining “the social and economic conditions that impede progress, equality and safety in the St. Louis region.” Activist, educator, and writer, Brittany Packnett Cunningham was appointed as a member of the Commission. 

[Courtesy of Wiley Price / St. Louis American]

As many as 200 anti-lynching laws have been introduced in Congress since 1900. The latest version, named for Emmett Till, is still being debated in Congress. 

[Image courtesy of Seattle Times]

George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old African American man was killed by police in Minneapolis. In a particularly brutal incident captured by a bystander in cell phone video, Floyd is heard repeatedly begging for his life as an officer kneels on his neck.

[Image courtesy of Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times]

The day after George Floyd was murdered, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis to protest his death and the other recent murders of Black people by police, including Breonna Taylor, Atianna Jefferson, Philando Castille, and countless others. Days later, protests grew to tens of thousands, and took place around the world. 

[Image courtesy of Jim Wilson/The New York Times]