Life Story: Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Mary Eliza Church was born on September 23, 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents, Robert Church and Louisa Ayers, were free Black business owners who had once been enslaved. Robert was a real estate investor and Louisa owned a very successful hair salon. 

Robert and Louisa worried that the schools in Memphis were not good enough for their daughter, so they sent Mary to live at the Antioch College Model School in Ohio when she was eight years old. Life at Antioch College was not easy for Mary. She was one of only a few Black students at the school, and she frequently experienced racism. She reflected on how awful it felt to be judged by the color of her skin and committed herself to living a life of acceptance.

After graduating high school in 1879 Mary enrolled at Oberlin College. She was one of only two Black women in her class. Although she still experienced racism, Mary found Oberlin a more welcoming place where she was often treated the same as her white counterparts. Mary chose to take more academically rigorous classes intended for men. 

Next, Mary pursued her master’s degree in education at Wilberforce University while teaching French, writing, reading, and geology. Wilberforce was a private, historically Black university. After graduating in 1888 Mary took a two-year trip to Europe, where she became fluent in French, Italian, and German. When she returned to the US she accepted a job teaching Latin at the prestigious M Street Colored High School in Washington, D.C. While there, she met fellow teacher Robert Terrell. They married in 1891.

Women were expected to stop working when they got married, so Mary left teaching and turned her attention to the world of social reform. In the late 1800s many women were involved in organizations that sought to improve society in a variety of ways. Mary proved to be an effective leader with a talent for bringing people together around issues she cared deeply about. In 1892 she founded the Colored Women’s League for Washington, D.C. The League provided night classes for women, childcare for working mothers, and kindergarten classes for Black children. Mary’s interest in helping Black mothers and children stemmed from her own personal experiences. Mary lost three babies before her daughter Phyllis was born in 1898. She hoped organizations like the Colored Women’s League would give other Black mothers better access to care and support.

Mary also worked with Ida B. Wells on a campaign to convince Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation. Lynching was an ever-present danger for Black Americans, and individual states took no responsibility for ending the practice. Mary lost a close friend to lynching and hoped to convince the federal government to take action.  

In 1895 the Board of Education for Washington, D.C. appointed Mary as its first Black member. For eleven years, Mary visited schools, raised money, and encouraged schools to celebrate Frederick Douglass Day, a precursor to today’s Black History Month.

In 1896 she was named the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a new umbrella organization that was formed to harness the power of local Black women’s clubs, including the Colored Women’s League. As a national federation, the NACW created unity across the Black reform movement and promoted respect for all Black women. 

Over her years of activism, Mary came to believe that real change would only be achieved once women had the right to vote. She became one of the few Black members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and built a relationship with Susan B. Anthony. Mary frequently had to remind her colleagues that not all suffragists were white and that Black women needed to be included in their efforts. Her contributions were not always welcome. Some white suffragists feared that including Black women would weaken their claims. Some Black activists feared that the suffrage movement was taking attention away from the more immediate needs of their communities. But Mary strongly believed that Black activism needed to be in conversation with the white suffrage movement for the benefit of Black women.  

In 1898 Mary gave a speech for NAWSA to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. She used the occasion to remind her mostly white audience of the thirtieth anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment and denounce the racism within the suffrage movement. But problems persisted. A 1913 suffrage parade organized by Alice Paul was segregated because some white suffragists did not want to march alongside Black women. This was a divisive moment for Black suffragists. Mary, along with other prominent Black women, such as Carrie Williams Clifford, agreed to march in the segregated group. But Ida B. Wells-Barnett marched with the state delegation of Illinois.

For all of her work with the suffrage movement, Mary never stopped campaigning for equal rights for Black Americans. She was one of sixty prominent leaders to endorse the NAACP at its founding in 1909 and helped found the Washington, D.C. branch. She published her memoir, A Colored Woman in a White World, in 1940, to share the story of her lifelong campaign for equality more widely. She stayed engaged in politics as she aged. In 1946, when she was eighty-three years old, Mary applied to reinstate her lapsed membership in the American Association of University Women to test the organization’s tolerance of Black members. When her application was denied, she sued until her membership was reinstated in 1948. The organization also changed its policies to allow members of color. Mary later said that not paving the way for other college-educated women of color would have been cowardly.

In 1949 Mary was invited to be the chairwoman of the new Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws (CCEAD). There had been anti-discrimination laws on the books in Washington D.C. since the 1870s, but they had never been properly enforced. Under Mary’s leadership, CCEAD fought to end segregation in restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places once and for all. Mary personally organized picket lines to protest racist businesses for weeks or months at a time. On her ninetieth birthday, she took a group of Black friends to the movies, expecting to be turned away. To her surprise, they were able to enjoy the movie in peace. Knowing that businesses were actually ending their segregationist practices was the perfect birthday gift for Mary.

A few weeks later, the Black community in Washington, D.C., threw Mary a ninetieth birthday luncheon. Over 700 people attended, including representatives from President Eisenhower’s staff. During the party, guests announced the creation of the Mary Church Terrell Fund, a charity that raised money to end racist discrimination in Washington, D.C.

Mary died in July 1954, less than two months after Brown v. Board of Education paved the way for the legal end of racial segregation. During her lifetime she influenced generations of Black women activists and laid the groundwork for the civil rights victories of the second half of the twentieth century.

• Brown v. Board of Education: A 1954 Supreme Court Case in which the Court ruled that laws that allowed for “separate but equal” education for students of different races were a violation of the Constitution.
• Fourteenth Amendment: The amendment that grants citizenship to those born in the United States and those who are naturalized.
• lynching: The extralegal execution of a person by a mob.
• National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA): Founded in 1890, this organization was the largest women’s suffrage organization in the US and instrumental in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
• National Association of Colored Women (NACW): Organization committed to the empowerment of Black women and communities.
• segregation: The act of separating people by race, class, gender, or ethnic group.
• suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to woman suffrage, or the right of women to vote.