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

Joan Quigley's Just Another Southern Town is an engaging and well-researched book on the civil rights activism of Mary Church Terrell in Washington, DC. Terrell was an important figure in the black freedom struggle, yet her activism remains under-studied. Quigley's book thus seeks to redress this gap in the literature. It reveals how the issue of segregation—and Terrell's fight against it in the courts—was central to the modern movement in the immediate post-World War Two era. The book opens with the moment in January 1950 when Terrell was refused service in a restaurant. The rest of the book details how Terrell came to be a civil rights activist and what happened when she took the restaurant to court to challenge Washington's segregation laws. Indeed, as Quigley notes, the nation's capital had, since the days of Reconstruction, functioned as a "vanguard and testing ground, heralding reforms before the rest of the nation." (8)

Mary Church Terrell's life spanned nearly a century, from the era of Civil War and slave emancipation to Brown versus Board of Education, the 1954 legal case that declared segregation unconstitutional. Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1863 to parents who had once been slaves. Mary was educated at Oberlin College and after graduating in 1884 she travelled around Europe. Upon her return, Terrell taught at Wilberforce University, and after moving to Washington, DC, she taught high school for a few years. In 1891, Mary married Robert Terrell, a Washington-based lawyer, and the couple settled in the nation's capital. Robert became a district judge and was active within the Republican Party. Both Mary and Robert were active Republicans (although Mary switched her allegiance to the Democrats in 1952), and Quigley's book explores the broader relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party, especially in the era of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. This reviewer, however, was left wanting a little more in the book on the Republican Party's often contradictory stance on race relations, particularly during the 1920s.

The central focus of the book, however, is Terrell's legal case in the early 1950s, and Quigley's account of how the case panned out is detailed and riveting. Quigley does a good job of revealing a complex (and, as it emerges, a relatively privileged) individual who became more radicalized during the World War Two era. As Terrell put it in 1949, "we are tired of being patient with being pushed around." (140) What Quigley's book achieves is a richly woven narrative that places the Civil Rights Movement within a much longer time-frame, which connects the Reconstruction era with the 1950s. The book is also a reminder of both the central role played by African American women in the Civil Rights Movement, and the crucial role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the history of civil rights. Quigley has done a fine service of revealing how segregation was challenged in the nation's capital and the centrality of Mary Church Terrell to that story.