A time out for Mary Church Terrell
Recently, I invited Kathleen Stone, author of They Called Us Girls:Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press, 2022), to talk about anything that was on her mind. Kathleen’s book chronicles the lives of seven unconventional women of the 1900s who broke out of society’s expected roles for women. Just the right topic for this blog!
Kathleen’s eye fell on Mary Church Terrell, a woman who I also encountered while writing my book on the woman suffrage movement, Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment. I’ll let Kathleen take it from here. Enjoy this guest post that touches on women’s rights from suffrage to civil rights, to, yes, even Title IX.
When my alma mater, Oberlin College, renamed its central library for Mary Church Terrell, I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was an alumna. Since then, I have come to understand that she was pivotal in two movements that share a complicated history — the movement for civil rights for Black Americans and the movement for women’s rights.
Mary Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, the year Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who had been enslaved. Her mother owned a hair salon and her father was a successful businessman. Education was one of her family’s goals, an opportunity often denied to Black Americans, and Mary headed to Oberlin College in Ohio.
Oberlin was the first college in the country to admit both men and women as well as students of color, but its embrace of equality went only so far. To women, the college offered a two-year program, and to men a four-year program, including Latin and Greek. Mary’s friends urged her to take the two-year program — if she were too educated, they warned, she would intimidate men and never find a husband. She ignored their advice and completed the four-year course, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1884 before going on to get a master’s. She taught at Wilberforce University, the first private, historically Black college in the country, and later moved to Washington, DC where she taught in the district’s segregated system.
Despite warnings that she would scare off men, Mary did marry. Her husband, Robert H. Terrell, was her intellectual match; he was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a teacher, lawyer, justice of the peace and municipal court judge.
A dual role in activism
Mary stood at the intersection of the movements for women’s rights and civil rights for Black Americans. She was the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a member of the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Women’s Republican League of Washington, D.C. She was the first African American woman to serve on the D.C. Board of Education.*
On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated, Mary marched down Pennsylvania Avenue with thousands of women, demanding the right to vote. When Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party staged picket lines at the White House in support of suffrage, she joined in, sometimes with her teenage daughter, even though violence and arrest were real possibilities.**
A dual disadvantage
After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, it must have been galling that some of her sisters-in-suffrage refused to involve themselves in the civil rights struggle. Mary tried to awaken them to her reality:
“A white woman has only one handicap to overcome — that of sex. I have two — both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country which has two such huge obstacles to overcome. Colored men have only one — that of race.”***
Her rhetoric was not only informative but also pragmatic. When she urged the National Woman’s Party to address the difficulties Black women experienced when trying to vote, she said:
“Colored women need the ballot to protect themselves because their men cannot protect them since the 14th and 15th Amendments are null and void. They are lynched and are victims of the Jim Crow Car Laws, the Convict Lease System, and other evils.”****
Despite her compelling logic, the party’s white leadership failed to take up her challenge.
That did not stop Mary. She continued her advocacy into the 1950s. At age 86, she joined a protest, ordering food at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., knowing that the segregated establishment would refuse to serve her. The subsequent lawsuit got to the U.S. Supreme Court where — a year before its landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education — it held that the restaurant had violated anti-discrimination laws.
A living legacy
Mary died in 1954, ten years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of both race and sex. It would be another eight years before Congress passed legislation, including Title IX, that outlawed discrimination in education. That, too, would have spoken to her passion.
Not many of us will have as far reaching an impact as Mary Church Terrell did. That’s certainly true for me, but she nonetheless inspires me. She reinforces my belief that education is crucial, opening opportunities for work and ways to contribute.
Mary also demonstrates the importance of speaking up for others. When she advocated for Black women in the South who were unable to vote and whose husbands were in prison, she was not speaking for herself, the wife of a judge appointed by the president. She was reaching beyond herself to speak for those without access to the venues where she found herself.
From Mary, I take inspiration that I can do something similar in my life, even if my actions are smaller and my words less consequential than hers. She would agree, I believe, that we all can work to make life better for others.
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* Biographical information drawn from articles by Mary Church Terrell’s biographer, Alison M. Parker, and from Lisa Gulasy, “Learning from Activist Mary Church Terrell,” Oberlin College & Conservatory (February 13, 2016). For a deeper dive, see Alison Parker’s biography, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell, the Forgotten ‘Face of African American Women’s Suffrage Activism,’” Ms. (February 13, 2021).
*** Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), p. 29.
**** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell: Black Suffragist and Civil Rights Activist,” National Park Service.