Ideology

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Draft Section on the Sources and Legacy of the Ideology of Mary Church Terrell.

Secularism

The active political career of Mary Church Terrell spanned seven decades and involved participation in dozens of different organizations and campaigns. Given this breadth of experience and activity, it is impossible to narrowly associate Terrell with any single social movement or ideological organization. Nevertheless, the two features that most distinguished her political and social thought were a thoroughgoing secularism and personal independence from religious organizations, and a firm ideological adherence to liberalism in the classical sense. Unlike a majority of the most prominent African American intellectuals and political activists who came of age in the decades following emancipation, Mary Church Terrell was not particularly religious and did nearly all of her political work through secular organizations. Except for her participation in the 1937, multi-denominational World Fellowship of Faiths as a representative of African American women, there is little record of Terrell’s participation in organizations that were even vaguely religious. Although she was by no means an avowed agnostic or atheist, and the 1892 lynching death of Tom Moss reportedly caused her to question previous beliefs about the “existence of a God,” Terrell mainly founded and participated in non-religious organizations. The relative absence of religion as a force shaping Terrell’s political worldview reflects Terrell’s lifelong position of relative privilege and exceptional educational background. At a time when Christian churches were among the most important institutions in both urban and rural African American communities, Mary Church Terrell was leading a life that had very little in common with the experiences of ordinary African Americans and she was pursuing a liberal education that would have been out of reach to most white American men, to say nothing of African American women.

Liberalism

Heavily influenced by her years of study and social activity at Oberlin College, Mary Church Terrell acquired liberal political principles and methods of political activity based on but not exclusively limited to lobbying, and moral suasion. Although she usually seems to have been more concerned with issue-based campaign work than with formally identifying herself according to ideology and political theory, Terrell’s career demonstrates that she was much more a reformist than a radical. During her many years of rigorous political activity, which mainly span from the decade of the 1890s until her death in 1954, Terrell always relied on the strategy of appealing to existing authorities for change and working within the established political parties. In her work as a liberal lobbyist and reformer, she founded many organizations which sought to win political rights and improve the lives of African Americans without any radical restructuring of the American political system or economy (see the Vehicles of Change section). The motto of the National Association of Colored Women, which Mary Church Terrell co-founded in 1896 was “Lifting as We Climb.”

Pressure Politics

Throughout her entire conscious political life, Mary Church Terrell argued and organized against the twin barriers of racism and sexism that characterized her society. Her first serious political activity involved writing articles and delivering speeches against lynching. She also produced writings denouncing and exposing chain gangs, the convict lease system, and the particular social challenges faced by African American women. Terrell was a lifelong opponent of Jim Crow segregation and she wrote and agitated against legal segregation in public accommodations and in employment. Far from a separatist or a revolutionary, her ideas about racial uplift were very much about assimilation into mainstream, white-dominated society and institutions. Terrell was quick to join forces with the reformist suffragist movement. Near the end of World War I she joined the National Woman’s Party in its campaign to win the vote for women. However in the suffrage movement as in her struggle against Jim Crow, Terrell’s career was characterized by a commitment to the strategy of lobbying prominent individuals and wings of the American political establishment. Mary Church Terrell was generally in favor of influencing powerful individuals within the government and getting rid of the ills of segregation and racism by working within the black establishment and within U.S. system of government. Until her participation in the founding of the NAACP, Terrell was a devotee of Booker T. Washington. She worked on Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign and was an avid supporter of the Republican Party, even after the Great Depression and the New Deal had captured a majority of the African American vote for the Democratic Party.

Late Life Political Developments

But despite a long career of advocating the politics of middle class and upper class respectability and working to influence the establishment, Terrell did prove that in some circumstances she was willing to employ militant tactics (albeit usually in order to force the application of certain laws rather than to break them). Historian Dorothy Sterling asserts that Mary Church Terrell “had walked on picket lines and associated with radicals before.” Towards the end of her very long life she made some of her boldest political pronouncements and demonstrated a renewed willingness to struggle against racism and injustice and even to struggle independently of the main political parties or the Black establishment. In the early fifties, when she almost reached the age of ninety, she began a campaign of systematically picketing Washington D.C. establishments that discriminated against African American customers. In 1953 she spoke out against the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg at a public meeting in New York City. And after her ninetieth birthday, Terrell traveled to Georgia to speak in defense of the wrongly accused black sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram. In some ways quite distant from her long personal history of political lobbying and appealing to white-controlled political groups, some of the steps that Terrell boldly took in the relative liberty of her advanced age anticipated some of the daring tactics and hard won concessions of the U.S. Civil Rights movement that was in its infancy at the time of Mary Church Terrell’s death.

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