Biography

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September 23,1863 (Memphis,Tennessee) to July 24, 1954 (Annapolis, Maryland)

Family

Mary Church's father, Robert Reed Church, was the son of Captain's Charles B. Church of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and a slave maidservant, Emmeline. Seperated from his mother when her owners moved further west, Robert was brought up by his father, who was fond of his slave son and gave him everything he wanted, except freedom. Settling in Memphis, young Church bought a saloon on De Soto Street, and courted Louisa Ayres.

Ayres was also relatively fortunate. A lady's maid in the Ayres household, where her mother was a housekeeper, she was taught to read and write, in violation of the law, and even given French lessons. When she agreed to marry Robert church, her master provided her with a trousseau from New York and an elegant wedding reception. After the Emancipation Proclamation freed the young couple, Louisa opened a hair-store where Memphis's wealthiest ladies flocked to get their hair done.

Mary Eliza was born on September 23, 1863 and was sheltered from the racial realities of the world she lived in as she grew up in a suburb of the city. While Mollie Church (as she was called growing up) was insulated from the past by her parents, her grandmother Eliza Ayres gave her some perception of her African heritage. Grandma Liz, was a marvelous storyteller, and told young Mollie stories about cruel masters and slave children who were sold away from their parents.

Mollie, however, didn't grow up in a perfectly functioning family as her parents divorced. She and her younger brother, Thomas went to live with their mother in a house on Court Street, a block away from the hair store. A divorce was uncommon then and was a painful process for young Ms. Church.

Education

Students of Oberlin College

Mary Church’s mother considered her daughter’s school in the basement of a church extremely inadequate and thus moved her daughter to the north for education. In the fall of 1870, Mrs. Church took sever years old Mary to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to enroll her in the Model School on the campus of Antioch College. Mary remained there for 5 years in boarding with the Hunsters, a black couple who were the owners of the town’s only hotel and ice cream parlour. Church was the only black child in her grade.

When Mary was 12, her parents sent her to Oberlin, Ohio to attend high school and then Oberlin College. At first she lived with a black family in town and later boarded in Ladies Hall, a college dormitory. Throughout her college career she tried to make use of the opportunities available to her and was active in various fields ranging from arts to sports. In Ladies Hall, she roomed alone or with a black roommate, but at mealtimes when other blacks were usually assigned to separate tables in the dining halls she was very often invited by the whites to sit with them. She was asked to join Aeolian, a prestigious literary society and represented it in public debates. She was also the editor of Oberlin Review.

Oberlin men took four years ‘Classical Course’ which earned them a degree of Bachelor of Arts. Most women enrolled in the ‘Literary Course’ which lasted for 2 years and led to a certificate. Mary’s friends urged her to take the “ladies’ course” arguing that the study of Latin and Greek was difficult and unnecessary (besides, it might spoil the chances of her getting a husband). She acted against the advice of her friends and ended up enrolling for the “gentlemen’s course”, often the only girl in class with 40 boys.

During her Oberlin years, Church divided her vacations between New York and Memphis. She and her brother were visiting their father in Memphis in 1879 when yellow fever spread through the Mississippi Valley. While most businessmen believed that Memphis was doomed, Robert Church scraped up every penny that he could to buy real estate at bargain prices. As the city recovered over the next decade, he became the first black millionaire in the South.

Mary Church graduated from Oberlin in 1884, one of three black women to receive a B.A. degree from the college that year.

Starting Work

Mary Church started teaching Latin in Washington’s Colored High School (then the foremost public school in the country for black youth) against her father’s wishes. She also met Robert H. Terrell there, who she later married. Terrell was the head of her department and had graduated from Harvard with honors.

Mary Church interrupted work to study in Europe for 2 years, learning French, German and Italian. She returned to Washington after that and married Terrell a year after that. Even the white papers of Memphis reported on the event in detail, describing the “elaborate menu and excellent champagne.” Lynching of a friend in Memphis and the death of her first born child, ended Mary Church Terrell’s preoccupation with domesticity. Plunging into community work she became the president of Bethel Literary and Historical Society, the nation’s foremost black cultural organization; a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education (the first black woman in the country to receive such an appointment); and a co-founder of the Colored Women’s League of Washington. In 1896, when the League merged with more than a hundred other women’s club to form the National Association of Colored Women, she was elected its first president. She remained in office for 5 years and was then made honorary president for life.

Choosing the motto Lift As We Climb, the National Association was concerned with improving access to basic necessities in black communities. The women started kindergartens and day nurseries, day and night schools and homed for the aged. In rural areas they taught the basics of hygiene and nutrition, in cities they set up courses in nurses’ training.

Terrell’s position on the District Board of Education, which she held for 11 years, was a demanding one. When Congress (which held the strings of the District) cut appropriations for the black schools, Terrell headed for Capitol Hill to persuade the lawmakers to change their minds. Her encounters with them were disheartening. Once she tried to convince a congressman that a black administrator should be paid $4000 a year, the salary that his white counterpart was receiving, “Four thousand dollars!,” the congressman seemed surprised, “ Why, no colored man in the world is worth that much.”

Although this was a busy period for Terrell it wasn’t always a happy one. Three times in the first five years of her marriage she gave birth, only to have the baby die within a few days. Adding to the depression that followed each death was the fact that had the babies not born in an inferior Jim Crow hospital they might have survived. When Terrell was pregnant for the fourth time her mother insisted that she come to New York where she could receive better medial attention. This time the baby lived and Terrell became mother to a baby girl named Phyllis. Four years old Phyllis found a sister in Mary, who was adopted by the Terrells from Thomas Church.

Motherhood never became a full-time occupation for Terrell. Phyllis was still a toddler when the Slayton Lyceum Bureau (the same agency that had approached Ida B. Wells as well) offered Mary Church Terrell a contract as a professional lecturer. She continued to voice her opinions through this medium for thirty years. She spoke at leading forums in New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland and college campuses across the country. She also addressed segregated audiences in the South in order to reach people who had never seen an educated woman before.

One of her greatest successes as a lecturer came in 1904, when she went to Germany to address the International Council of Women. Arriving in Berlin where everyone was curious to meet “die Negerin,” the only dark skinned delegate- she found the German women critical of the English and Americans who planned to speak in English, a language that few of the Europeans understood. Terrell scrapped the speech she had already written and wrote a new one – in German. She was greeted with thunderous applause when she gave one speech in flawless German and a second one in French. “Die Nergerin” was declared “the hit of the congress,” and at its close editors from half a dozen countries requested for articles on the “race problem” in the United States.

Other Aspects of Her Work

Mary Church Terrell served on the NAACP’sexecutive committee and then organized a District of Columbia branch for it. She also served on the executive committee of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was president of the Southwest Community House, a settlement house in Washington, and was a member of the District Attorney’s Council on Playgrounds and Recreation. As the number of women in politics increased, Terrell’s organizational talents and her ability as a public speaker were in demand. In 1929, when Congresswomen Ruth McCormick decided to run for the Senate (the first woman that had entered a senatorial race), she asked Mrs. Terrell to come to Illinois to campaign among black women. Three years later, she was in New York, to work for the reelection of Herbert Hoover, under the Republican National Committee.

Along with all her work she wrote, revised and collected rejection slips for her autobiography. However, in 1940 the first autobiography of a black woman was published, A Colored Woman in a White World and was received well.

After the war, she was feted with at the 50th jubilee of the National Association of Colored Women (NACWC), honored by the National Council of Negro Women and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Oberlin, Wilberforce, and Howard. After three years of applying for a membership and being rejected the first time, she was also accepted to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in 1949.

Victory at the Lunch Counters

Though Terrell could attend meetings of the AAUW, she still could not buy a cup of coffee in a restaurant, nor could she attend a theater or concert. She joined the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia’s Anti-Discrimination Laws. On January 7th, 1950 she and three other people went into Thompson’s Restaurant, a cafeteria two blocks from the White House. She and her colleagues managed to put bowls of soup on their trays but they could eat it, they were asked to leave. That afternoon, Committee lawyers filed a complaint with the Corporation Counsel of the District, charging that Thompson’s had violated the old civil rights laws.

While the case made its slow journey through the courts, the Committee convinced 20 restaurants to open their lunch counters to all customers. However, there were many more that still discriminated. The Committee then decided to distribute leaflets in front of stores to urge a customer boycott, and then set up picket lines. Terrell was a leading figure for this, she led the lines during the cold and hot for two years.

One by one the stores agreed and Mrs. Terrell and her fellow picketers were invited to buy pie and coffee at their lunch counters. Finally, on June 8th 1953, Justice William O. Douglas read the decision, “The Acts of 1872 and 1873..remain today a part of the governing body of laws applicable to the District.” Eat anywhere the Afro-American wrote in their headline. That fall seven hundred people gathered in a ballroom to celebrate Mary Church Terrell’s ninetieth birthday. After she thanked them in her powerful voice, they pledged to end all race discrimination in Washington by the time she was one hundred.

However, she didn’t live to see that. Mary Church Terrell passed away on July 24, 1954. She was buried in the new headquarter building of the National Association of Colored Women.

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The sources of this information are Black Foremothers by Dorothy Sterling, (Copyright 1988 by The Feminist Press at the City Univeristy of New York) and A Colored Woman in a White World by Mary Church Terrell (Reprinted edition 1980 by Arno Press Inc).