The Progress of Colored Women / by Mary Church Terrell ...
(The progress of colored women / by Mary Church Terrell .....)
The progress of colored women / by Mary Church Terrell ... is a historical publication which is considered to be one of the top primary source publications on the subjects of African American's and slavery. Qontro Historical Reprints is republishing high
A Colored Woman In A White World (Classics in Black Studies)
(Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (18...)
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.
Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women’s suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women’s rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women’s rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.
With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women’s studies and African American history.
Mary Eliza Church Terrell was an American educator, civil rights advocate, and feminist.
Background
Mary Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863. She was the daughter of Robert Reed Church and Louise Ayres Church. Both of her parents had been slaves. Her mother owned and operated a successful hairdressing establishment at the time of her birth, while her father was the son and employee of a white riverboat captain, Charles B. Church. Her parents were divorced about 1869 or 1870, and after her mother moved to New York City, Church remained in Memphis with her father, who later remarried.
Education
In 1869 Church was sent to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where for two years she attended the model school of Antioch College, then spent an additional two years in public school. Although light-skinned like her father, she early identified herself as black and became aware of the issue of race. While still in grammar school, according to her autobiography, she resolved to "show those white girls and boys whose forefathers had always been free that I was their equal in every respect. . I felt I must hold high the banner of my race. " In 1873 she moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where she graduated from public high school, attended one year of preparatory classes, then entered Oberlin College in 1880. She was an outstanding student, popular with her classmates, active in the literary society, and an editor of the Oberlin Review. She graduated in 1884.
Oberlin College awarded Terrell the honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
Career
Following her graduation, Church lived with her father in Memphis. He had prospered in real estate, and did not wish his daughter to take a teaching position, but in 1885 she accepted an offer from Wilberforce University, in Xenia, Ohio, to teach five different courses for $40 a month. Two years later she joined the language department of M Street High School, the black secondary school of Washington, D. C.
During the summer of 1888 Church traveled through Europe with her father. She stayed abroad for two years, studying French, German, and Italian and completing the requirements for the Oberlin M. A. Returning to M Street High School in 1890.
Terrell turned to civic activities. She attended woman suffrage meetings, helped organize the Colored Women's League of Washington in 1892, volunteered at Southwest Community House, taught night school classes, and sent Washington news dispatches to Woman's Era. When a federation of black women's organizations held its convention at Washington in 1896, Terrell advocated its merger with the Colored Women's League, and the National Association of Colored Women was formed, with Terrell as its first president. She was reelected in 1897 and 1899 and became honorary president in 1901. Under her guidance the association pressed for kindergartens and day care centers, broader educational opportunities, and an end of discriminatory practices. In 1895 Terrell was appointed to the Washington, D. C. , school board. She was the first black woman to serve in this capacity. She resigned in 1901, but was appointed to a second term that ran from 1906 to 1911.
Her public speaking career began in the 1890's with talks to Congregational church groups. In 1898 she delivered an address entitled "The Progress of Colored Women" before the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She continued to accept speaking engagements after the birth of two healthy daughters; her mother joined the family and helped care for the children. She spoke on black women, lynching, Jim Crow practices, and the convict lease system. The North American Review published her article on lynching in 1904; other pieces, rejected by American periodicals, appeared in the English magazine Nineteenth Century and After.
In 1904, at the Berlin meeting of the International Council of Women, Terrell won wide acclaim by delivering her remarks in English, German, and French. She also spoke at W. E. B. Du Bois's 1903 Atlanta University conference and helped Du Bois prepare the report, The Negro Church: A Social Study (1903). It was at Du Bois's suggestion that she was made a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
She was a friend of Booker T. Washington, who persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint Robert Terrell, her husband, to the Washington, D. C. , municipal court in 1909. Because her husband, the first black to hold this position, had to be reappointed every four years, Terrell was forced to be circumspect in her activities. Rather than wage "a righteous war, " she personally submitted to the discriminatory practices of realtors and government personnel managers during World War I. In 1919 Terrell addressed the Zurich conference of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the following year she worked for the Republican National Committee. Reforms in the public schools, black welfare work, and the race relations section of the Washington Federation of Churches occupied her in the 1930's.
After speaking before the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faiths at London in 1937, Terrell called on H. G. Wells, who urged her to write her autobiography. Published in 1940, with a foreword by Wells, A Colored Woman in a White World is an honest account of a life "circumscribed and handicapped" by race and sex.
A decade later, wearing a hearing aid and using a cane, Terrell at last led her "righteous war" against discrimination in the District of Columbia. She served as chairman of the coordinating committee to enforce the District of Columbia laws of 1872-1873, and with her associates negotiated with restaurant owners, tested their willingness to serve blacks, and picketed against those who would not comply. When she was refused service in the John R. Thompson Restaurant, Terrell brought suit. In 1953 the case reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that legislation banning discrimination in District of Columbia restaurants and hotels was valid and enforceable. At a ninetieth birthday party in the Washington Statler Hotel, Terrell reminded her admirers that theaters still discriminated against blacks. She herself would have joined the campaign against segregated theaters, but she died the following summer in Annapolis, Md.
Achievements
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Mary Church Terrell on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Terrell was among 12 pioneers of civil rights commemorated in a United States Postal Service postage stamp series.
The Mary Church Terrell house in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington was named a National Historic Landmark.
M. C. Terrell Elementary School at 3301 Wheeler Road, SE in Washington, DC was named for her.
(The progress of colored women / by Mary Church Terrell .....)
Views
Quotations:
"A white woman has only one handicap to overcome - that of sex. I have two - both sex and race. . .. Colored men have only one - that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex. "
"And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long. "
"Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear. "
Membership
In 1896, Terrell became the first president of the newly formed National Association of Colored Women (NACW), whose members established day nurseries and kindergartens, and helped orphans. Also in 1896, she founded the National Association of College Women, which later became the National Association of University Women (NAUW).
She was also an active member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was particularly concerned that the organization continue fighting for suffrage among black women. With Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, she formed the Federation of Afro-American Women.
Connections
On October 18, 1891, in Memphis, Church married Robert Heberton Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC.
Terrell and her husband had three children who died in infancy; their daughter Phyllis was the only one to survive to adulthood.
Mother:
Louisa Ayres Church
1844–1911
Spouse:
Robert Heberton Terrell
1857–1925
colleague:
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
She was an African-American publisher, journalist, civil rights leader, suffragist, and editor of the Woman's Era, the first newspaper published by and for African-American women.
Father :
Robert Reed Church
1839–1912
Friend:
Booker T. Washington
He was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States.
