Mary Church Terrell

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on the twenty-third of September 1863, three weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Her father Robert Reed Church Sr. was one of the wealthiest African Americans of the late nineteenth century — a property developer and bank founder; her mother Louisa Ayers operated a hair salon.

She took her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in 1884 — among the first Black women in the country to earn a B.A. — and her master's there in 1888. She taught Latin at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., where her colleague and friend Anna Julia Cooper would later be principal.

In 1896 she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women and was elected its first president. In 1909 she signed the founding call for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as one of two Black women among the original sixty signatories. She lectured across the United States and Europe — in English, French, and German — on lynching, voter suppression, and the conditions of Black women in the United States.

In her ninetieth year — 1953 — she led the legal challenge that desegregated Washington, D.C.'s restaurants. She picketed segregated lunch counters in the city herself. The Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. (1953) struck down the segregation of public accommodations in the District. She did not live long enough to see Brown v. Board of Education the following year.

She died in Annapolis, Maryland, on the twenty-fourth of July 1954, age ninety.

She is honored here as the suffragist who closed her own life's work by picketing in her ninetieth year.