What it means to be colored in the capital of the United States
What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States is the speech Mary Church Terrell delivered in Washington in 1906, in which she described to a white audience, in order and in detail, the ordinary transactions of a day that segregation closed to her in the city that housed the federal government.
It is not a speech about the South. Its whole force comes from the address: the exclusions it lists were operating within walking distance of the Capitol, in the one place where the national government, and nobody else, set the terms.
The occasion: Washington, 1906, and a white audience
The occasion was an address in Washington in 1906 to an audience of white listeners who, by the speech's own construction, did not know what it was going to tell them. Terrell was by then a national figure in Black women's organized life, having been the founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and she was speaking in the city she lived in rather than reporting from a distance. The word colored is her own, and the term of her period; it stands in the title of the speech and in the name of the association she led.
The choice of audience determines the method. A speaker addressing people who already know the facts can argue about remedies. A speaker addressing people who do not know the facts has to establish them first, and Terrell establishes them by taking a listener through a day rather than through a set of propositions.
What the speech says, in order
The speech says, item by item, what a Black resident of Washington could not do, and it says it in the first person so that each exclusion has a person attached to it. The sequence runs roughly as follows.
- Eating: she cannot buy a meal in a downtown restaurant, whatever her means or her manners.
- Sleeping: she cannot take a room in a hotel of the kind her position would otherwise place her in.
- Sitting: theaters, concert halls and public amusements are closed to her or confine her to a separate place.
- Working: training and qualification do not open employment, and young people finish courses of instruction that no employer will let them practice.
- Living: renting or buying a house is restricted, so the choice of where to live is made for her.
- Belonging: the accumulation of these refusals amounts to a status, and the status is fixed by the color line rather than by anything she has done.
The list is the argument. Terrell does not open with a thesis about injustice and support it with examples; she lays down the examples until the thesis is unavoidable, and only then names it. That construction is why the speech reads as reportage and lands as indictment.
Why the capital was the place to make this argument
The capital was the place to make this argument because Washington is the one American city whose civic arrangements Congress controls directly. Segregation in a southern state could be described, by a comfortable northern listener in 1906, as a local matter belonging to somebody else's legislature. Segregation in the District of Columbia could not. It operated under the eye of the government that administered the district, and it operated in the city to which the country brought its foreign visitors and its own schoolchildren to see how the republic was run.
Terrell puts the geography to work throughout. The point is not that Washington was worse than elsewhere. The point is that whatever Washington did, the United States did, and a nation whose founding claims about equality were kept in the custody of its own government was maintaining a color line in the streets outside the offices that held them. That is what the speech was for: to remove the excuse of distance.
What Mary Church Terrell did apart from this speech
Terrell, who lived from 1863 to 1954, spent nearly sixty years in organized public work, and the 1906 speech sits in the middle of it rather than at its summit.
| Work | When | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| National Association of Colored Women | Founded in 1896 | She was a founder and its first president, heading the principal national body of Black women's clubs |
| The Washington speech | 1906 | An address to a white audience describing segregation in the capital |
| Picketing segregated restaurants in Washington | Early 1950s | She was still on the sidewalk in her eighties, over the same refusals she had described in 1906 |
The last row is the one to hold on to. The same woman who told a Washington audience in 1906 that she could not buy a meal downtown was picketing Washington restaurants over the same refusal in the early 1950s, and she died in 1954. Nearly half a century separates the speech from the picket line, and the grievance did not change in the interval.
Why this speech belongs with the suffrage documents
This speech belongs with the suffrage documents because the campaign for the vote and the color line were never separate subjects, however often the campaign's own literature treated them as though they were. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it was done at Seneca Falls. The Declaration of Sentiments set out the grievances of women as a class, in terms that assumed a particular kind of woman. In 1869 the movement split, and in the arguments around the split Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, in explicitly racist terms that several of them put in print. Southern state affiliates of the suffrage organizations that followed drew a color line of their own.
The Nineteenth Amendment, certified on 26 August 1920, bars a denial of the vote on account of sex and says nothing else. It did not touch the poll tax, which stood in federal elections until the Twenty Fourth Amendment of 1964, and it did not touch the registration practices that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was written to reach. Terrell was fifty seven when the amendment was certified and she was still picketing in the early 1950s, which places one life across the whole of that gap. What was actually said in Washington in 1906 is the clearest surviving statement of what the gap consisted of.