Mary Eliza Church Terrell was a renowned educator and speaker who campaigned fearlessly for women’s suffrage and the social equality of African Americans.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, September 23, 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Mary Eliza Church was part of a changing America. She was the daughter of affluent African American parents, both of whom were previously enslaved. Her mother, Louisa Ayers Church, owned a hair salon. Her father, Robert Reed Church, was a successful businessman who would later become one of the South’s first African American millionaires.
Terrell’s parents sent her to Ohio to attend preparatory school at Antioch and later Oberlin College. There she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. At a time when women were not expected to achieve academically, Terrell excelled—and committed herself to passing on what she learned. After teaching for two years at Wilberforce College, she moved to Washington, D.C. to teach high school, where she met lawyer and future judge Robert Terrell. They married in 1891.
Mrs. Terrell held firm to the idea of racial uplift—the belief that blacks would help end racial discrimination by advancing themselves through education, work, and activism. Her words “lifting as we climb” became the motto of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the group she cofounded in 1896.
Understanding the intersectionality of race and gender discrimination, she lectured, penned essays, and spoke out on behalf of the women’s suffrage movement—even picketing the Woodrow Wilson White House with members of Howard University’s Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
Terrell was an active member of the National Association of Women’s Suffrage Act (NAWSA), where she worked alongside the organization’s founder, Susan B. Anthony. Terrell was invited to deliver two speeches on the challenges faced by women, and particularly women of color in America, at the International Congress of Women in Berlin in 1904. She was the only woman of African descent invited to speak at the conference. She delivered her speeches in German, French, and English, receiving a standing ovation from the audience.
Terrell, along with journalist Ida B. Wells, organized anti-lynching campaigns to mobilize advocates and generate awareness. Later she would protest President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 discharge of 167 African American soldiers for unfounded conspiracy claims in Brownsville, Texas. She wrote columns and essays espousing the importance of dignity and respect for the soldiers and demanded a fair trial. Her efforts were to no avail at the time, although an Army investigation in 1972 led to the honorable discharges of all the soldiers, only two of whom were still alive.