Good morning POU Family! Happy Halloween! Continuing on with this week’s open thread theme, we will highlight Mary Church Terrell.
Mary Church Terrell (September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954) was one of the first African-American women to earn a college 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 Church Terrell was born Mary Church in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, 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 Malagasy 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. The younger 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. He is considered to be the first African-American millionaire in the South.
Terrell’s mother, Louisa Ayers, 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, Ayers was a successful entrepreneur at a time when most women did not own businesses. She is credited with having encouraged her daughter to attend Antioch College Model School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, for elementary and secondary education, because the Memphis schools were not adequate. Mary attended Antioch College Model School from 1870 to 1874, starting at the age of seven. When she was twelve, she attended high school in Oberlin, Ohio, where she would remain during her college years.
Mary Church Terrell, known to members of her family as “Mollie,” and her brother were born during their father’s first marriage, which ended in divorce. Their half-siblings, Robert, Jr., and Annette were born to Robert Sr.’s second wife, Anna Wright. Robert Church later married a third time.
Terrell later majored in Classics at Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept African American and female students. She 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 earned her degree in classics on the “gentleman’s path”, which was a full four years of study as opposed to the usual two years for women. She graduated alongside notable African-American intellectuals Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt. Together, these three Oberlin graduates grew to become lifelong colleagues and highly regarded activists in the movement towards racial and gender equality in the United States. Continuing her studies at Oberlin, Terrell earned her master’s degree in Education four years later.
Terrell began her career in education in 1885, teaching modern languages at Wilberforce University, a historically black college founded collaboratively by the Methodist Church in Ohio and the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the state. She 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, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian.
Upon returning to the United States, Terrell shifted her attention from teaching towards social activism, focusing especially on the empowerment of black women. She also wrote profusely, including an autobiography, and her work was published in several journals.
On October 18, 1891, in Memphis, Church married Robert Heberton Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC. The couple had met in Washington, DC, then they both worked at the M Street High School, where he became principal.
Terrell and her husband had three children who died in infancy; their daughter Phyllis Terrell was the only one to survive to adulthood. She was named after Phillis Wheatley. The Terrells later adopted a second daughter, Mary.
Having been an avid suffragist during her years as an Oberlin student, Terrell continued to be active in the happenings within suffragist circles in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Through these meetings, she became associated with Susan B. Anthony, an association which Terrell describes in her biography as “delightful, helpful friendship”,[8] which lasted until Anthony’s death in 1906. What grew out of Terrell’s association with NAWSA was a desire to create a formal organizing group among black women in America to tackle issues of lynching, the disenfranchisement of the race, and the development of a new educational reform. As one of the few African-American women who was allowed to attend NAWSA’s meetings, Terrell spoke directly about the injustices and issues within the African-American community.
On February 18, 1898, Terrell gave an address titled “The Progress of Colored Women” at the National American Woman Suffrage Association biennial session in Washington, D.C. This speech was a call of action for NAWSA to fight for the lives of black women. The speech received a great reception from the Association and black news outlets, ultimately leading Terrell to be invited back as an unofficial (black) ambassador for the Association. Though many black women were concerned and involved in the fight for American women’s right to vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association did not allow black women to create their own chapter within the organization. Terrell went on to give more addresses, such as “In Union There is Strength”, which discussed the need for unity among black people, and “What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the U.S.”, in which she discussed her own personal struggles that she faced as an African American woman in Washington, D.C.
In A Colored Woman In A White World, Terrell recalls how she was able to navigate her college years at the predominantly white-attended Oberlin with a sense of ease due to her racial ambiguity. In subsequent years, it can be noted that she understood her mobility as a white-passing African-American woman as necessary to creating greater links between African-Americans and white Americans, thus leading her to become an active voice in NAWSA.