Historical Context
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The Life of Mary Church Terrell in Historical Context
The life of Mary Church Terrell, although generally comfortable and privileged, took place in the context of economic crises, violence and systematic racial discrimination that affected millions of her fellow African Americans. Despite her exceptional education, relative wealth, and seeming willingness to live as a member of the American elite, Mary Church Terrell was herself acutely aware of the discrimination and violence that affected other African Americans and she personally experienced the effects of Jim Crow and the color line. Any examination of her role in American history will profit from a discussion of the historical events that shaped her life.
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The Civil War and Reconstruction
Mary Church Terrel was born in 1863, at a time when the future of the North American slave system and the national political dominance of northern industrial capitalists were being decided through the violence of the Civil War. Terrell’s parents were among the narrow layer of former slaves who achieved financial prosperity as small business owners and landlords. Mary Church Terrell was fourteen years old in 1877 when reconstruction ended in the South and the property rights and political power of former slaveholding elites were largely restored by armed white militias with the tacit support of the federal government. The end of reconstruction was followed by the establishment of Jim Crow legislation, which contributed to the codified discrimination of the 1865 Black Codes and accompanied the growth of lynch law. In 1881, Terrell’s home state of Tennessee was the first to enact official Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation on railroad cars.
Lynch Law and Jim Crow
The 1890s witnessed more lynchings than any other decade in U.S. history. Spurred to take political action by the lynching of a friend in 1892, Mary Church Terrell helped found the National Association of Colored Women and initiate its campaigns against lynching and against segregation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington was rising to the leadership of a political movement for African American self-help based on accommodation to the U.S. government and political elites. American cities experienced deadly race riotssuch as the ones in Springfield Illinois in 1908, East St. Louis in 1917, and Chicago in 1919. The NAACP was founded in 1909, partially in response to the Springfield race riot.
World War I and the Great Depression
During World War I, as the Great Migration was beginning to bring millions of southern African Americans to live in northern cities, the government actively sought women workers to fill federal jobs. Mary Church Terrell was hired as a clerk in the War department until she was ‘discovered’ as an African American and transferred to an all black department. Towards the end of World War I, Terrell participated in the woman’s suffrage movement and helped picket the White House with members of the National Woman’s Party. After 1920, when woman’s suffrage was granted through the passage of the nineteenth amendment, Terrell became more active in electoral politics and frequently worked to get out women voters for republican election campaigns.
With the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, millions of Americans and a disproportionately high amount of African Americans were thrust into dire economic straits. The meager relief measures associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal were catalyzed by major transformations in U.S. politics including the rise of industrial unionism, a wave of sit-down strikes, and the moderate growth of left-wing organizations. As the democratic party became associated with the mildly reformist agenda of the New Deal, a majority of African American voters switched their political alliegances to the democrats. Nevertheless, Mary Church Terrell remained a republican and participated in the Republican National Convention in 1940.
World War II and the Prelude to the Civil Rights Movement
During and immediately after World War II, much of the groundwork was being laid in the United States for the rise of the civil rights movement in the fifties, sixties, and into the seventies. In 1939 the NAACP created the Legal Defense and Education Fund in preparation for desegregation battles. In 1941 Bayard Rustin founded the Congress on Racial Equality. Soon after World War II, U.S. capitalists began a process of overturning segregation in places where it did not suit their interests, such as Professional Sports and the U.S. military. The Brown v. Board decision which overturned legal segregation in public schools occurred in 1954, the last year of Mary Church Terrell’s life. Terrell’s persistent organizing and picketing against Jim Crow establishments during the last years of her life anticipated the final overturning of legal segregation in public establishments.
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