Jackie Mansky wrote about Terrell’s fight for Smithsonian Magazine in 2016, illustrating it with this portrait by Betsy Graves Reyneau.

x How one woman helped end lunch counter segregation in the nation's capital. https://t.co/7W57faqRWs pic.twitter.com/gWAZBXAVyK Ã¢ÂÂ Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) June 8, 2016

Mansky explains that Terrell made her lunch plans with a greater goal in mind.

On February 28, 1950, 86-year-old Mary Church Terrell invited her friends Reverend Arthur F. Elmes, Essie Thompson and David Scull to lunch with her at Thompson’s. Only Scull was white, and when the four entered the establishment, took their trays and proceeded down the counter line, the manager told the group that Thompson’s policy forbid him from serving them. They demanded to know why they couldn't have lunch in the cafeteria, and the manager responded that it was not his personal policy, but Thompson Co.’s, which refused to serve African Americans. The group left without their meals. But the ill-fated lunch date was no accident. As chairwoman of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws, Terrell was setting up a test case to force the courts to rule on two “lost laws” that demanded all restaurants and public eating places in Washington serve any well-mannered citizen regardless of their skin color. Over three drawn out years, a legal battle followed, which ultimately took their case all the way to America’s highest court.

Terrell’s activism—toward the end of a long life spent fighting for the rights of women and black Americans—has been meticulously detailed by Joan Quigley in Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital.

Published in 2016, the book brings Terrell, and the nation’s capital, into recent Civil Rights Movement history. Though she died on July 24, 1954, just two months after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, Terrell played a key role in moving desegregation forward.

Through the prism of Terrell's story, Quigley reassesses Washington's relationship to civil rights history, bringing to life a pivotal fight for equality that erupted five years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus and a decade before the student sit-in movement rocked segregated lunch counters across the South.

For anyone looking for books for young people, Fight On!: Mary Church Terrell's Battle for Integration, by Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin, is recommended for grades 5-9.

The acclaimed civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) is brought vividly to life in this well researched and compelling biography. The daughter of an ex-slave, Terrell was considered the best-educated black woman of her time. She was the first African American member of the Washington, D.C., Board of Education, and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Counting such noted leaders as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Ida B. Wells among her friends, Mary Church Terrell was an important and influential woman in the battle for integration.

Terrell’s life spanned every aspect of what we now celebrate in both “Black History Month” and “Women’s History Month,” encompassing enslavement, Reconstruction, the battle for suffrage, the founding of the NAACP, lynchings, Jim Crow, and integration.

Mary Eliza Church was born on Sept. 23, 1863, in Memphis, and was the daughter of emancipated slaves. Her father, real estate entrepreneur Robert Reed Church, was one of the South’s first black millionaires; her mother, Louisa Ayers Church, owned and operated a beauty salon. Terrell’s parents divorced when she was very young, but both were insistent that she get a good education; she attended Ohio’s integrated Antioch College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1884, and a master’s degree in 1888. She toured Europe for two years after graduation, learning both German and French. Her multilingualism enabled her to deliver her 1904 speech to the International Congress of Women in Berlin, “Progress and Problems of Colored Women,” in both languages, earning her a standing ovation.

While teaching in Washington, D.C., she met and married Robert Herberton Terrell in 1891. He would become the District’s first black municipal judge.

Terrell told her own story in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, which was published in 1940.

Through her eyes, we experience her first childhood encounters with racism, the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878-79 that decimated Memphis, her move to the North with her mother, where they were accepted as white (and listed that way in the census). She was able to “pass” and yet made a decision to reject escaping into the safety of whiteness.

She details the pain that spurred her to action after the lynching of family friend Tom Moss, in Memphis, whose death at the hands of the mob would also spark Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching crusade.

She wrote:

I had read of such lynchings before and had been deeply stirred by them. A normal human being is always shocked when he reads that a man or a woman had been burned at the stake or shot to death, whether he is acquainted with the victim or not. But when a woman has been closely associated with the victim of the mob from childhood and knows him to be above reproach, the horror and anguish which rend her heart are indescribable...For a time it came near to upsetting my faith in the Christian religion. I could not see how a crime like that could be perpetuated in a Christian country, while thousands of Christians sinfully winked at it by making no protest loud enough to be heard nor exerting any earnest effort to redress this terrible wrong

Terrell accompanied Frederick Douglass to a meeting with President Benjamin Harrison to implore him to speak out against lynching. Though he gave them a sympathetic hearing, he did nothing.

Terrell’s work as a co-founder of the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., along with Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson, led her to activism on behalf of black women nationally. Decades before women like Frances Beale would organize around the ”double Jeopardy” faced by black women, Terrell recognized the dual weight of racism combined with sexism.

Washington-based journalist and filmmaker Robin Hamilton produced a short documentary on Terrell in 2017. In the film, Just Another Southern Town author Quigley states that “She was Rosa Parks, before Rosa Parks.”

x YouTube Video

The film also focuses on the fight to save Terrell’s home.

Today, her former home on 326 T Street is a dilapidated frame in LeDroit Park. Its current state threatens to erase a landmark that deserves to be preserved for a woman whose efforts continue to impact this city. What the house symbolizes, and its need to be restored challenges Terrell’s legacy as a symbol of possibility and determination.

Dignity and Defiance: A Portrait of Mary Church Terrell is available through libraries.

In 2018, historian and author C.R. Gibbs, as well as Terrell biographer Joan Quigley joined Hamilton in a screening and panel discussion of the film.

x YouTube Video

There are no monuments to Terrell in D.C.. However, as discussed in Hamilton’s documentary, her home still stands, now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. But it has fallen into disrepair.

x Mary Church Terrell House, 326 T Street. Washington, D.C.



Home of Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), a black educator, suffragist, civil rights activist, lecturer and writer. Among her many achievements, she was the first black woman to be appointed to an American school board. pic.twitter.com/LcazcDum1w Ã¢ÂÂ black power. (@THECULTURESHIFT) February 6, 2019

In 2018, Howard University received federal grants to protect the home, sparking hope that it may be restored: The Mary Church Terrell House was listed on DCPL’s Most Endangered Places List in 1999, which is designed to draw attention to threatened historic places in Washington, D.C. “Although sporadic attempts had been made to restore the home, it has remained perpetually vacant and is […] now in a deteriorating state,” Drayer says. But a recent windfall may change the Terrell house’s fate. In March 2018, current owner Howard University received grants from the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to restore the home. The grants total $12.6 million for sites around the country that protect civil rights history. DCPL also received a grant to complete a multiple-property document that uncovers historic resources associated with the 20th-century African American civil rights movement D.C. The university and local preservationists have long had an interest in restoring the house. Now that Howard has the funds to do so, potential reuse options include creating a visitor’s center for the university or a historic house museum for the Terrells and their civil rights legacy. Drayer explains that there is plenty of interest within the community for the latter option, “especially in a neighborhood where demographics are constantly shifting, and where new people don’t know how important this home was. With the grant, it looks like Howard might finally have the chance to make the house visible again.” Terrell was also a popular orator. Some of her most important speeches are available online.

“A Plea for the White South by a Colored Woman,” which she delivered in 1904, still resonates today when we examine racist Trump supporters, Republican Trump enablers, the ongoing efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress our votes, and the rise of youthful Nazis.

If there were any sign of improvement among southern white people as a whole, so far as concerns their attitude toward every subject which bears, even remotely, upon the race problem, their prospects, as well as those of the people who are oppressed, would be far brighter than they are. But no microscope now on the market is sufficiently powerful to enable even the lynx-eyed to detect the slightest change for the better. Legislatures in the southern States are never more enthusiastic and industrious than when they are bent upon enacting measures for the purpose of repressing the coloured man's aspirations by law. Today one State legislature will exhaust Webster's Unabridged trying to find language sufficiently strong and lurid to express the necessity of dividing the taxes so that coloured children shall have no more schools than taxes paid by their parents will support. Tomorrow another State will actually pass a law, as Louisiana has done, prohibiting the public schools for coloured children from instructing them beyond the fourth or fifth grades, with the understanding that what they get in the five grades shall be none too good. … According to official statistics a coloured man was lynched in Mississippi every eighteen days in 1905, and of this number only two were even charged with what is so falsely and maliciously called the "usual crime." One was shot because he was accused of writing an insulting letter, and one because he was charged with making threats. Crimes heinous enough occur in the North, it is true, but it is inconceivable that an institution so diabolical as the Convict Lease system could flourish anywhere in the North, East, or West with the knowledge and consent of either the citizens or the officials of the respective States. A short time ago the Grand Jury of Ware Co., Georgia, declared that at least twenty citizens of that county were held as slaves in a camp owned by one of the leading members of the Georgia legislature. The witnesses who were called testified that brutalities practiced in this camp were too revolting to be described. Thus the white youth of the South are being hardened and brutalized by the shocking spectacles they are forced to witness on every hand. Truly the South is sowing seeds of lawlessness and cruelty which in the very nature of the case will spring up armed men in the years to come. Accounts of deeds of violence recently perpetrated by white students upon coloured people amply prove this fact. Last December the cadets of Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., made a revengeful raid on the house of a coloured man, beat him unmercifully and marched him half dead, to jail, simply because it was rumored that he either fired a shot at the cadet himself, or knew the man who did. Not only by examples of cruelty and lawlessness, but also by social and political demarcations based exclusively upon race and class, the white youth of this country are being tainted in a very conceivable way. 'Resolved, That a Jim Crow Car Law should be adopted and Enforced in the District of Columbia' was the subject of a discussion engaged in January of the present year by the Columbian Debating Society of the George Washington University, which is situated in the National Capital, and decision was rendered in favour of the Jim Crow car.

(emphasis added)

In 1906, Terrell wrote “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States.”

As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House, ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food, if it was patronized by white people, unless I were to sit behind a screen. As a colored woman I cannot visit the tomb of the Father of this country, which owes its very existence to the love of freedom in the human heart and which stands for equal opportunity to all, without being forced to sit in the Jim Crow section of an electric car which starts from the very heart of the city— midway between the Capitol and the White House. If I refuse thus to be humiliated, I am cast into jail and forced to pay a fine for violating the Virginia laws. Every hour in the day Jim Crow cars filled with colored people, many of whom are intelligent and well to do, enter and leave the national capital. As a colored woman I may enter more than one white church in Washington without receiving that welcome which as a human being I have a right to expect in the sanctuary of God. Sometimes the color blindness of the usher takes on that peculiar form which prevents a dark face from making any impression whatsoever upon his retina, so that it is impossible for him to see colored people at all. If he is not so afflicted, after keeping a colored man or woman waiting a long time, he will ungraciously show these dusky Christians who have had the temerity to thrust themselves into a temple where only the fair of face are expected to worship God to a seat in the rear, which is named in honor of a certain personage, well known in this country, and commonly called Jim Crow.

Another battle Terrell waged was against the 1923 plans put fort,h by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for the construction of a monument to “mammies.”

x Was just thinking of how heroic black women like Mary Church Terrell rose up - to stop congress from building a humiliating "Mammy" monument in Washington D.C.

https://t.co/pleIvzVqA8 Ã¢ÂÂ Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) March 17, 2020

University of Delaware history professor Alison M. Parker’s chronicled this hidden history in a February opinion piece for The New York Times.

In 1923, a group of white women wanted to build what they called a “monument to the faithful colored mammies” in Washington. These women, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, pressed lawmakers in Congress to introduce a bill. The Senate passed it, but the bill stalled in the House after fierce opposition from black women, including Mary Church Terrell and Hallie Quinn Brown, members of the National Association of Colored Women. … The civil rights and feminist activist Mary Church Terrell wrote a widely reproduced editorial in The Evening Star, a white Washington newspaper. Indicting the Southern white women who proposed the monument, Terrell’s scathing critique called out their past and current complicity in the sexual abuse of black women by white men: “When one considers the extent to which the black ‘Mammy’ was the victim of the passion and power of her master or any other white man who might look with lustful eyes upon her,” she wrote, it’s difficult to understand how “the wives, mothers and sisters of slave owners could have submitted without frequent and vigorous protests to such degradation of the womanhood of any race.” She added, “And it is harder to understand why their descendants should want to behold a perpetual reminder of the heart-rending conditions under which Black Mammies were obliged to live.”

Want to get involved in preserving Mary Church Terrell’s legacy? Join By the People, the Library of Congress’ crowdsourced transcription, review, and tagging project.

x Make tomorrow a #DayOn and honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by making civil rights history easier to find and read. We need your help to transcribe and tag the writings of activist and educator Mary Church Terrell: https://t.co/IBXqR89AB2 #MLKDay2019 pic.twitter.com/5qQSkHXknV Ã¢ÂÂ LOC Crowdsourcing (@Crowd_LOC) January 20, 2019

I’ll close today with two quotes from Terrell.

• "Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear." • "Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep."

Black women were and are foundational in the struggle for all our rights, currently illustrated in the key role we play in the modern Democratic Party. It should come as no surprise that today’s activism stands on the shoulders of foremothers like Mary Church Terrell.

I hope you will join me next Sunday, for another Women’s History Month introduction to a key black woman from our past.