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  • Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital by Joan Quigley
  • Catherine A. Conner
Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital. By Joan Quigley. New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 358. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-937151-8.

The life of Mary Church Terrell, which spanned from the Civil War to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was truly exceptional. Born free to an affluent family, Terrell struggled to maintain her freedoms as Jim Crow worked to erase them. Through the National Association of Colored Women and its local clubs, Terrell and other elite black women advocated for improvements in public health and education, spoke out against lynching and Jim Crow, and promoted women's rights. Yet Terrell's activism rested on internalized racism. Her mission was to lift up the "unfit" members of her race, carefully distancing herself from them as she climbed the ladder of respectability back to full citizenship. Such work placed her as the leading woman of color for her generation, but her sex often limited her reach and her full inclusion in emerging national civil rights organizations.

This complicated tangle of race, class, and gender, as well as Terrell's long life and activist career, begs for historical analysis. Unfortunately, journalist Joan Quigley's Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital does not offer it. The book provides an overview of Terrell's life alongside the shifting racial politics of Washington, D.C., from the mid-1860s to the mid-1950s, ending with the District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. Inc. (1953) desegregation case that Quigley highlights as the precursor to Brown. Quigley is more successful showing an exceptional woman who led an unfulfilled life than one who was an activist. Readers looking to understand Terrell's arguments, work, contradictions, and contextualization within the larger black freedom struggle will emerge knowing more about her travels abroad, the dresses she bought, the food she ate, and the architecture and decor of buildings she entered. Readers will know more about her unhappy marriage and much more about her [End Page 713] husband's work within the Republican Party. Quigley often moves the spotlight away from Terrell toward men, a strategy that undercuts her subject's importance and reinforces the sexism Terrell encountered. To be fair, Quigley confronted a limited amount of archival sources on Terrell compared with the abundant sources on black and white men. One such man was U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who favored desegregation in Washington and the nation before his eight colleagues did. Indeed, the inner politics of the nation's highest court, as well as its evolving thoughts on desegregation, has in this book more drama, more analysis, and more attention than the woman in the subtitle.

Nonacademic forays into history can be remarkable works, ones we put on the syllabus or use in class. They can weave narratives together without stilted or obtuse prose, relying instead on the themes and topics that proliferate in scholarship. Quigley's work is well packaged in that it taps into the recent biographical take on the black freedom struggle and considerations of urban Jim Crow. If there is an argument to this book, it is that, throughout Terrell's long life, racial politics in Washington, D.C., resembled the South'srather than the nation's.Quigley would have been better served by reading the latest scholarship in urban and civil rights history that reveals the national scope of Jim Crow as well as by adopting historical methods to make the most out of scant sources. There is a great history to be written about Terrell's activist work in the nation's capital, but Just Another Southern Town barely scratches the surface.

Catherine A. Conner
North Carolina State University
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