Mary Ellen Church Terrell (1864-1954) is known as the Mother of African American suffrage. The daughter of former slaves, she attended Oberlin College, where she majored in classics and languages. While there, she became one of the first African American women to earn a Masters degree. She also became a strong believer in women’s suffrage.
Upon graduation, Mary Terrell became a teacher of classics and modern languages at Wilberforce College and later in the Washington DC. Schools. She then spent two years in Europe, returning fluent in Italian, French and German.
But when her friend Thomas Moss was lynched in 1892 because his grocery business was competing with white ones, she set out to make a difference. Believing that suffrage was essential to elevating the whole Black community, she attended the National American Women Suffrage Association meetings whenever they were held in Washington.
At a meeting in the early 1890s, she submitted a petition to the organization asking for their resolution to include a protest against the injustices black people were subjected to. Susan Anthony stepped forward to help her make her submission, and Terrell struck up a friendship with her that lasted their lifetimes.
Mary Terrell went on to give speeches for the NAWSA, delivering a highly praised keynote on “The Justice of Woman Suffrage” in 1898.
It was not easy being a suffragist as the excerpt from Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography below shows.
But it was even harder for a black woman. Due to racism among the suffrage association members, black women suffragists were not allowed to form their own chapters of the NAWSA. Susan Anthony named Terrell an unofficial ambassador for black women, and Mary Terrell went on to found the National Association of Colored Women in response.
Later, when she brought a contingent of Howard University students to the 1913 Suffragist Parade in Washington, some women there objected to having black students participate. Inez Milholland, the woman on the white horse and a close friend and supporter of Terrell’s work, insisted a place be made for them with the students from the other schools.
After World War 1, Mary Terrell and her daughter Phyllis worked tirelessly for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. They joined the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and, with Alice Paul, and other members of the Silent Sentinels, picketed the White House in 1917.
The following excerpt is from A Colored Woman in a White World, Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography, written in 1940.
The first large suffrage meeting which I attended was one in Washington at which women who were interested in the subject were present from all over the world. Among the women sitting on the platform at that meeting were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two of the pioneers of the suffrage cause. Of course, Miss Anthony was there. At the close of one of the meetings the presiding officer requested all those to rise who believed that women should have the franchise. Although the theater was well filled at the time, comparatively few rose. I was among the number who did. I forced myself to stand up, although it was hard for me to do so. In the early 1890s it required a great deal of courage for a woman to publicly to acknowledge before an audience that she believed in suffrage for her sex when she knew the majority did not. I can not recall a period in my life, since I heard the subject discussed for the first time as a very young girl, that I did not believe in women’s suffrage with all my heart. When I was a freshman in college, I wrote an essay entitled “Resolved, There Should Be a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution Granting Suffrage to Women.” Nevertheless, it was not easy for me publicly to commit myself to women’s suffrage in that large gathering.
This happened before Mr. Terrill proposed to me. When I told him I stood up in Albaugh’s Theater and publicly taken a stand for women’s suffrage, he laughingly replied that I had ruined my chances for getting a husband. I told him I would never be silly enough to marry a man who did not believe a woman had the right to help administer the affairs of the Government under which she lived. Mr. Terrell, however, ardently believed in women’s suffrage when few men took that stand. Nothing amused him more than to hear a self-sufficient, important young man argue against suffrage with a woman who had the point in its favor at her tongue’s end and could deliver her verbal blows with telling effect. “Just listen to that woman wipe the floor up with that with that narrow-minded, conceited, young coxcomb.” he would chuckle. “There won’t be a greasespot left when she gets through with him.” (p. 144)
“I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.”
-Mary Church Terrell
Learn more…
Mary Church Terrell had many other accomplishments in her fight for justice against racism. Check out these resources to learn more.
Biography: Mary Church Terrell https://www.biography.com/activist/mary-church-terrell
National Women’s History Museum: Mary Church Terrell https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-church-terrell
Perfect timing on this article! A friend of mine was just telling me last night that she thought suffrage only ever benefitted white women — how wonderful to be able to share today’s article with her. Thank you!
I so admire these women who risked so much to get the vote. I particularly admire Mary Terrell as she had a double battle. As she said, “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome – that of sex. I have two – both sex and race. … Colored men have only one – that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.”
— Mary Church Terrell