Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital by Joan Quigley (review)

A combination of biography and legal and political histories, Quigley’s book recounts the story of Mary Church Terrell’s career of antiracist activism in Washington, D.C. Recovering Terrell’s leading role in devising the District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson case against restaurant segregation in the capital—one of those cases enfolded in the litigation culminating in Brown v. Board of Education—Quigley reminds us that “Washington was just another southern town in its treatment of African Americans” (19), especially after President Woodrow Wilson implemented segregation. Thus, symbolically and legally, “to overturn Plessy [v. Ferguson] . . . , the Court had to start by upending government-sanctioned segregation in Washington” (160). Best known as the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, Terrell has long been a famous but obscure figure. Quigley’s greatest and most fascinating contribution is the reconstruction of Terrell’s reflections, friendships, family life, and relationship with her husband Judge Robert Terrell through heretofore un-accessed diaries and correspondence.

Quigley’s book is an enjoyable read, but for students of U.S. history, especially of civil rights, it is significantly limited. Relying on an impressive range of primary documents but a small set of textbooks, legal histories of segregation case law, histories of Washington, and biographies of presidents and Supreme Court justices but almost none of the excellent histories of the long civil rights movement published in the last two decades, Quigley offers a top-down political history that proceeds from an outdated premise. She neglects the insights offered by historians such as Honey—whose works are set in Terrell’s hometown of Memphis—Biondi, Sugrue, Gilmore, or even Ransby—whose biography of Ella Baker could have provided a model.¹. Instead, Quigley inserts Terrell and the Thompson case into the popular misperception of a decade-long civil rights movement that began in 1954 with Brown v. Board and ultimately vanquished a segregation that was a purely southern phenomenon. From this narrow vantage point, Terrell certainly might be understood as the “radical” that Quigley names her rather than the liberal proponent of black Victorianism that she was.

Certainly, as Quigley argues, Terrell’s lifetime of activism from her coming of age in the 1890s to her death in 1954 demonstrates that African Americans continually fought for full freedom and that black women were key leaders in the struggle. But these are well-established findings. Furthermore, Quigley’s characterization of the effects of segregation as primarily “indignity” and “shame”—words that she uses repeatedly—belies the historical interventions accomplished by at least one generation of scholars who detail the economic devastation, violence, and psychological and legal dehumanization that Jim Crow wrought in every region of the nation, as well as the truly radical visions and courageous feats that African Americans and their allies undertook to only partially dismantle it.

Although Quigley certainly augments our understandings of a pivotal black woman and of the intricate legal battle against segregation, her book fails to grapple with the complexity of the civil rights movement. Thus, it falls short of helping us to wage the ongoing struggle for a wide-ranging, revolutionary social justice.