Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell was the founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women, formed in 1896, a suffrage campaigner who argued for the vote and against segregation as one subject rather than two, and the chair of the committee that broke the color bar in Washington restaurants in the early 1950s, when she was in her eighties.
She lived from 1863 to 1954. She worked in three places at once: inside the Black women's club movement she had built, inside the white suffrage associations that were courting the South, and in the District of Columbia, where she had a school board seat and a quarrel with every segregated counter in the city.
What Terrell did for the suffrage movement
For the suffrage movement Terrell did the work that carried the argument into rooms where it was not welcome. She spoke at National American Woman Suffrage Association conventions at Susan B. Anthony's invitation, and her subject there was the position of Black women, in a hall whose southern delegates were being told that woman suffrage would strengthen white political control. She picketed the White House with the National Woman's Party, the wing of the campaign that used confrontation rather than lobbying. She took part in the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March 1913, the march Alice Paul organized for the day before Wilson's inauguration, where Black participants were asked to walk at the rear and Ida B. Wells refused the instruction and stepped into the Illinois delegation as it passed.
Terrell also said that the Nineteenth Amendment, certified on 26 August 1920, would not by itself enfranchise the women she represented, and she was right: it bars denial of the vote on account of sex and says nothing else, so the poll taxes, literacy tests and white primaries of the southern states went on working. She did not live to see the Twenty Fourth Amendment of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Her early life and the course she chose at Oberlin
Her early life was unusual for a Black American of her generation and she knew it. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church, who had been born enslaved and became a businessman in the city, and the money sent her north to school: first to the model school at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then to Oberlin College, one of the few American colleges admitting both women and Black students.
At Oberlin she took the classical course, the longer program with Greek and Latin in it that men took, rather than the shorter literary course offered to women, and she graduated from it. She went on to take a master's degree, taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then Latin at the M Street High School in Washington, and studied in Europe, where she learned French, German and Italian; she later addressed the International Council of Women in Berlin in German, French and English. She was appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and is generally recorded as the first Black woman in the United States to sit on a school board.
The National Association of Colored Women, 1896
The National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 out of a merger of existing Black women's clubs, and Terrell was its first president. Its founding was a response to a specific insult: a published attack on the character of Black women in general, circulated by a white journalist, which the clubs decided to answer by organizing rather than by replying. The association ran kindergartens, mothers' clubs, homes for the aged and settlement work, and it campaigned against lynching and against the convict lease system.
The association's program had a weakness worth stating plainly, because Terrell chose it deliberately. It rested on respectability: the argument that the visible conduct and education of Black women would refute the charges made against them. That put the burden of proof on the accused and let the accusers set the standard. It also drew the leadership from a narrow, educated and largely light skinned layer, which the association's own later members said out loud.
What the 1906 Washington speech described
The speech Terrell delivered in Washington in 1906, "What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States", described segregation as a schedule rather than as a principle. It went through the capital as a Black resident encountered it: the hotels that would not take her, the restaurants that would not seat her, the theaters and department stores, the store that would not let a Black customer try on a hat, the trained graduates who could not get work in the federal city their taxes paid for. It named practices instead of arguing about rights in the abstract, which is why it survives as evidence and not only as rhetoric.
The Washington restaurant campaign in the early 1950s
In the early 1950s Terrell chaired the committee that set out to enforce a pair of Reconstruction era District of Columbia statutes forbidding restaurants to refuse well behaved customers on account of color. The statutes had never been repealed; they had been left out of later editions of the District code and forgotten, which is why they were called the lost laws. The committee tested them by walking into segregated restaurants, being refused, and filing the complaint, and it picketed and boycotted the department store lunch counters. Terrell walked those picket lines herself, in her eighties.
The test case reached the Supreme Court as District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., and the Court held the old statutes valid and enforceable, which desegregated eating places in the capital. Terrell was the named chair of the campaign, not its lawyer, and the litigation was argued by counsel; the part that was hers was the organizing, the picketing and the refusal to stop while the case went up.
What the record does not support
- That she was excluded from the 1913 procession. Black women were pressed to march at the rear and some were turned away from delegations, but Terrell marched.
- That she won the Thompson case personally. She chaired the coordinating committee behind it and picketed for it; the case was argued by lawyers and decided on the surviving text of the old District statutes.
- That she came late to confrontation. She had picketed the White House with the National Woman's Party decades before the restaurant campaign.
- That she wrote as an outsider to the white movement. She was a member of it, spoke at its conventions and was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and she made her criticisms from inside.
Terrell set out her own account in an autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. She died in 1954, the year the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. The earlier speakers she is placed alongside, among them Sojourner Truth, who spoke at Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851, argued from their own testimony with no organization behind them; Terrell built one first and then argued.