The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches

Mary Church Terrell

188 Mary Church Terrell What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American women had an especially pronounced effect on their communities. Through their work as educators, as members of women’s clubs, or as social activists —and frequently as all three—women such as Anna Julia Cooper, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Mary McLeod Be­ thune established schools, lobbied for reforms, and helped found landmark organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mary Church Terrell was one of these active and influential women. Mary Church was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, to two newly emancipated slaves, Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayres Church. Church’s parents had enjoyed more privileges and opportunities than most slaves, including receiving an education, and upon emancipation, they were able to prosper. Louisa opened shop as a hairdresser, and her husband used the cash she accumulated from her work to invest in Memphis real estate during a yellow fever epidemic shortly after the Civil War. When Memphis came back economically after the epidemic, the Churches became the first African American millionaires in the South.1 Although Mary Church grew up in material prosperity, which shielded her from many of the day-to-day brutalities of prejudice and discrimination , there were several vivid episodes that made her aware that her skin color counted more than her family’s wealth, education, or social standing. Her maternal grandmother, for example, “Aunt Liza,” recounted horrific and tragic stories of her own slavery experiences.2 When Mary was nine, What It Means to Be Colored 189 her parents divorced, and she moved with her mother to New York City. She was, however, sent away to progressive, integrated boarding schools in Ohio, but even there she encountered everyday prejudice at the hands of her fellow students and teachers. In 1884, she became one of only three African American women to graduate from Oberlin College, and the first to graduate with the AB degree in the classics, a course of study normally reserved for men.3 After graduation, Mary Church took a teaching position at Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio, the leading institution of higher learning for African American students. In 1887, she moved to Washington, DC, where she taught the classics at M Street Colored High School, a highly respected school for African American children. Acceding to her father’s wishes, Church took two years away from teaching to tour Europe, where she particularly polished her language skills in French, German, and Italian. She returned to Washington, DC, and M Street Colored High School, and in 1891, she married Robert H. Terrell, a graduate of Harvard who had been chair of the Latin department in which she taught. In 1910, he was appointed a judge in the District of Columbia municipal court.4 Following the custom of the time, Mary Church Terrell resigned her teaching post upon her marriage to Robert. Although “retired” from teaching , Terrell was actively employed in civic and political affairs. In 1895, she became one of two women appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education, assuming responsibility for supervising the “colored” schools. In that position, she strongly advocated for equal educational opportunities and for increased control of the schools by African American administrators . That year, she was also elected president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Terrell was active in the woman’s suffrage movement and a frequent contributor to reform-minded magazines and newspapers such as the Independent. When Mary Church Terrell delivered her 1906 lecture “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” the District of Columbia had earned the reputation of being “The Colored Man’s Paradise.” Governed by federal statute, enlightened laws such as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided legal freedoms that African Americans governed by state and local laws did not have. Because of such federal “protection,” many emancipated slaves moved to DC after the Civil War.5 By 1900, over eighty thousand African Americans lived in Washington, comprising 31 percent of the district’s total Mary Church Terrell 190 population.6 Despite constituting such a large proportion of the population and the federal government’s ostensible commitment to racial equality, segregation and discriminatory practices persisted...