In this 250th anniversary year, return to 1776 when New Jersey drew up a surprising constitution. This founding document, alone among the 13 colonial constitutions, allowed “all inhabitants” of the colony to vote, opening the door for some women and free Black persons to vote. And they did! We have the voting rolls to prove it. Meet these suffrage pioneers who went to the polls for 31 years, until they were disenfranchised in 1807.
The women of New Jersey and the other 12 colonies did everything they could to aid the Patriot cause in the American Revolution, even women who had just been told they had no voice in our developing nation. Meet some of these brave and selfless women whose heroic acts helped the Patriots win the war. Yet when the Constitution was drawn up in 1787, women were not rewarded for their patriotism with a citizen’s right to vote, setting the stage for the eventual women’s suffrage movement.
Join us for this illustrated talk at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 31, at the East Amwell Museum, 1053 Old York Road, Ringoes, NJ 08551. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the museum at 908-237-3303.
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.
Mary Church Terrell
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.
This year has been all about the virus, but even so, I haven’t let it stop me from talking about the suffrage fight. About halfway through the year, a foursome of suffragists joined my payroll — the Suffragette Quartet! Unlike humans, they can pose for the camera without being masked.
