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.

Georgia Douglas Johnson Residence

Georgia Douglas Johnson Residence

You never know what history you’re going to find when you’re riding a bike around this city.  During this ride, as I was riding in the Cardoza neighborhood near U Street in northwest D.C., I happened upon a historical marker on a cast iron fence that surrounded a grey townhouse at the end of the block at the corner of S and 15th Streets.  In turned out to have been placed there to mark the house, located at 1461 S Street (MAP), where Georgia Douglas Johnson once lived.  So naturally, I later researched her to find about the woman who once lived at that house, and was important enough to be recognized.

Georgia Douglas Johnson was an African American poet and playwright.  She is best known for her collections of poetry: “The Heart of a Woman” (1918) (see below), “Bronze” (1922), “An Autumn Love Cycle” (1928) and later, “Share My World” (1962).  In addition to poetry, Georgia also wrote over two dozen plays, and authored a newspaper column for over a decade.  Throughout her life she wrote 200 poems, 28 plays and 31 short stories. For her works, she was considered an important member of the “New Negro Movement,”  an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s.  The New Nego Movement would later become known as the “Harlem Renaissance.”

Born in Atlanta, Georgia on September 10, 1877, Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp was born to Laura Douglas and George Camp.  Her mother was of African and Native American descent, and her father was of African-American and English heritage.  She grew up and received her education in Georgia, graduating from Atlanta University’s Normal School in 1896.  She then went on to become a teacher, but resigned to pursue her love of music, attending Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio.  After studying at Oberlin, she returned to Georgia and returned to the educational field.

She married Henry Lincoln Johnson, an Atlanta lawyer and prominent Republican Party member, on September 28, 1903.  Henry’s law career brought them to D.C. in 1910, when Henry received an appointment as the Recorder of Deeds from President William Howard Taft.   It was his career that kept them here as well.  So although she was considered an important member of the Harlem Renaissance, she was never a New York City resident, neither when the movement was in full swing in the 1920s or after.  Instead, she and her family continued to live here in D.C.

Georgia and her husband had two sons, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Jr., and Peter Douglas Johnson.  But by the time they became teenagers, her husband passed away, leaving her alone to raise their boys.  This began a difficult period in her life, as she struggled to raise two boys and provide for her family financially.  As a gesture of appreciation for her late husband’s loyalty and service, President Calvin Coolidge, a devoted member of the Republican Party, appointed Georgia the Commissioner of Conciliation, a position within the Department of Labor.  So throughout the last 50 years of her life, Georgia raised and supported her family alone, while continuing and expanding her writings.

Also after her husband’s death, Johnson began to host weekly “Saturday Salons” for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence, and many of the other noted women writers of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. The S Street House, which became known at that time as the “S Street Salon,” became a satellite of sorts for others who were part of the Harlem Renaissance to meet, socialize, discuss their work, and exchange ideas while they were visiting the nation’s segregated capital. Gloria called her home the “Half Way House” for friends traveling, and where those with no money and no place to stay would be welcome.

Gloria died in 1969 at the age of 85.  And as she lay in her deathbed, one of her sister playwrights and a former participant of the S Street Salon, sat by her bedside “stroking her hand and repeating the words, ‘Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson’.”

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

The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Note:  The house has undergone numerous renovations over the years, during which previous owners divided it into flats, and later turned it into a group home.  It was recently renovated and restored.  And last year, the six-bedroom, six-bathroom, 4,100-square-foot property was on the market for $2.875 million.