Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell (born Mary Eliza Church; September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954) was one of the first African-American women to earn a college Masters degree, and became known as a national activist for civil rights and suffrage. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street school (now known as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School)—the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1896, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the Colored Women’s League of Washington (1894). She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and served as its first national president, and she was a founding member of the National Association of College Women (1910).
Mary Eliza Church was born in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayres, both freed slaves of mixed racial ancestry. Her parents were prominent members of the black elite of Memphis after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Era. Her paternal grandmother was of Madagascar and white descent and her paternal grandfather was Captain Charles B. Church, a white steamship owner and operator from Virginia who allowed his son Robert Church — Mary’s father — to keep the wages he earned as a steward on his ship. Robert Church continued to accumulate wealth by investing in real estate and purchased his first property in Memphis in 1862. He made his fortune by buying property after the city was depopulated following the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Robert Church, Mary’s father, is considered to be the first African-American millionaire in the South.
Terrell’s mother, Louisa Ayres, is believed to be one of the first African American women to establish and maintain a hair salon, frequented by well-to-do residents of Memphis. All in all, Ayres was a successful entrepreneur at a time when most women did not own businesses.
Terrell attended Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept African American and female students. She majored in Classics and was one of the first African American women to attend the institution. The freshman class nominated her as class poet, and she was elected to two of the college’s literary societies. She also served as an editor of The Oberlin Review. Terrell earned her bachelor’s degree in 1884. She continued her studies at Oberlin, and earned her master’s degree in Education four years later, in 1888, becoming (along with Anna Julia Cooper) one of the first two black women to earn an MA.
Terrell later moved to Washington, D.C. to accept a position in the Latin Department at the M Street School. After teaching for a time, she studied in Europe for two years beginning in 1888, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian. Eventually, Oberlin College offered her a registrarship position in 1891 which would make her the first black women to obtain such position; however, she declined.
When she married Robert Heberton Terrell in 1891, after returning from Europe, she was forced to resign from her position at the M Street School where her new husband also taught. In 1895 she was appointed superintendent of the Dunbar High School, becoming the first woman to hold this post. She was preceded by Mary Jane Patterson, the first Black female principal of Dunbar, and the first African American female college graduate to earn a B.A , and Anna J. Cooper, the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D..
When Terrell returned to the United States 1891, and after she was forced to resign from Dunbar, she shifted her attention from teaching to social activism, focusing especially on the empowerment of black women. She also wrote profusely, including an autobiography. Her writings were published in several journals. Included in Terrell’s long list of published work is “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View,” which was published in 1904. In this essay, she attempts to dismantle the skewed narrative of why black men are targeted for lynching and she presents numerous facts to support her claims.
In 1880, through her father, Terrell met Booker T. Washington, director of the influential Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. At the age of 17, when she was enrolled at Oberlin, she also met activist Frederick Douglass at President James Garfield’s inaugural gala. She became especially close with Douglass and worked with him on several civil rights campaigns. One of these campaigns included a petition both Terrell and Douglass signed in 1893, that addressed the lawless cases where black individuals in certain states were not receiving due process of law.
Shortly after her marriage to Robert Terrell, she considered retiring from activism to focus on family life. Douglass, making the case that her talent was too immense to go unused, persuaded her to stay in public life.
Terrell worked actively in the women’s suffrage movement, which pushed for enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Active in the Republican Party, she was president of the Women’s Republican League during Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign. The 1920 presidential elections were first elections in which primarily American white women were given the right to vote. The Southern states from 1890 to 1908 passed voter registration and election laws that suppressed African-Americans’ right to vote. These restrictions were not fully overturned until after Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though Terrell died in 1954, her legacy and early fight for black women to vote continues to be cited.
In 1950, she started what would be a successful fight to integrate eating places in the District of Columbia. In the 1890s the District of Columbia had formalized segregation, as did all states in the South. Before then, local integration laws dating to the 1870s had required all eating-place proprietors “to serve any respectable, well-behaved person regardless of color, or face a $1,000 fine and forfeiture of their license.” In 1949, Terrell and colleagues (Clark F. King, Essie Thompson, and Arthur F. Elmer) entered the segregated Thompson Restaurant. When refused service, they promptly filed a lawsuit. (1953 District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co.)
Attorney Ringgold Hart, representing Essie Thompson, argued on April 1, 1950, that the District laws were unconstitutional, and in 1953, won the case against restaurant segregation. Terrell was a leader and spokesperson for the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws which gave her the platform to lead this case successfully.
In the three years before the decision in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Terrell targeted other restaurants. Her tactics included boycotts, picketing, and sit-ins. It took over three years for a Supreme Court decision, but finally, on June 8, 1953, the court ruled that segregated eating places in Washington, DC, were unconstitutional. This was a year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Even into her 80s, Terrell continued to participate in picket lines, protesting the segregation of restaurants and theaters. During her senior years, she also succeeded in persuading the local chapter of the American Association of University Women to admit black members.
She lived to see the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which stated that it was unconstitutional to practice racial segregation in public schools. Terrell died two months later at the age of 90, on July 24, 1954, in Anne Arundel General Hospital in Highland Beach, Maryland.
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