Votes for Women

Votes For Women

With voting already underway and Election Day for the upcoming presidential election day happening tomorrow, and the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in the United States happening just 76 days ago, I decided to make the theme of this bike ride women’s suffrage.  So, I rode to see a mural located on Florida Avenue and 1st Street (MAP) near the Big Bear Café in northwest D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood. The mural is entitled “Votes For Women”, and features Mary Church Terrell, who was a well-known African American activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

She was born Mary Eliza Church on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, both freed slaves of mixed racial ancestry.  Her father was a successful businessman who became one of the South’s first African American millionaires, while her mother is believed to be one of the first African American women to establish and maintain a hair salon, which was frequented by well-to-do residents of Memphis. Her parents divorced during her childhood, but their affluence and belief in the importance of education enabled Terrell to become one of the first African American women to earn a college degree. She attended the Antioch College laboratory school in Ohio, and later Oberlin College, where she earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

On October 18, 1891, she married Robert Heberton Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in D.C.  The couple had met when she began working at the M Street High School, previously known as the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth, where he was the principal.  Terrell and her husband had three children who died in infancy; their daughter Phyllis Terrell was the only one to survive to adulthood.  She was named after Phillis Wheatley, the first African American author of a published book of poetry.  The Terrells later adopted a second daughter, Mary.

Terrell wore many hats throughout her lifetime.  She became a teacher, school administrator and school board member,  She was a writer whose long list of published work included books as well as pieces for such publications as The Washington Evening Star, The Washington Post and Ebony magazine.  She was also part of the rising African American middle and upper class who used their position to fight racial discrimination, and became a nationally-known activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Terrell passed away at the age of 90, on July 24, 1954, in Anne Arundel General Hospital in Highland Beach, Maryland.

Other interesting facts about Mary Church Terrell include:

• Terrell’s activism was sparked in 1892 when an old friend, Thomas Moss, was lynched in Memphis by whites because his business competed with theirs.
• Through her father, Terrell met Booker T. Washington, director of the influential Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
• At the age of 17, when she was enrolled at Oberlin, Terrell also met activist Frederick Douglass at President James A. Garfield’s inaugural gala. She became especially close with Douglass and eventually worked with him on several civil rights campaigns.
• Oberlin College offered Terrell a registrarship position in 1891 which would make her the first African American women to obtain such position; however, she declined.
• In 1895 she was appointed superintendent of D.C.’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and later became the first African American woman to be appointed to a school board in a major city.
• Terrell, along with other fellow activists, founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and was named the organization’s first president.
• After teaching for a time, she studied in Europe for two years, where she became fluent in French, German, and Italian.
• At the urging of W.E.B. Du Bois, Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
• In 1913, Terrell helped organize the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, and later helped write its creed that set up a code of conduct for black women.
• Terrell was active within suffragist circles in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and through the association’s meetings became friends with Susan B. Anthony.
• Terrell was active in the Republican Party and was president of the Women’s Republican League during Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign.
• At Oberlin College’s centennial celebration in 1933, Terrell was recognized among the college’s “Top 100 Outstanding Alumni” and was later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by her alma mater in 1948. They also named its main library the Mary Church Terrell Library in 2018.
• Terrell co-founded the College Alumnae Club, later renamed the American Association of University Women, of which she was the first African American admitted to the D.C. chapter.
• In her zeal for woman suffrage, Terrell picketed President Woodrow Wilson’s White House with members of the National Woman’s Party.
• Terrell was a delegate to the International Peace Conference in England after the end of World War I, and while there she stayed with H. G. Wells and his wife at their invitation.
• Terrell served on a committee in D.C. that investigated alleged police mistreatment of African Americans.
• Terrell’s husband went on to become a successful attorney who would eventually become D.C.’s first African American municipal judge.
• In 1940, Terrell published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, outlining her experiences with discrimination.
• In 1950, at age 86, after being refused service by a whites-only restaurant, Terrell and several other activists sued the establishment, laying the groundwork for the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled all segregated restaurants were unconstitutional.
• Just two months before she passed away Terrell saw the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, which ended segregation in schools.

         
[Click on the photos to view the full-size versions]

NOTE: While finding out more about Terrell I learned that her home in D.C.’s LeDroit Park neighborhood was named a National Historic Landmark. So, I intend to ride there and find out more about it one day soon.