Mary Church Terrell: An Original Oberlin Activist

Lecturer

The Monthly Rhetoricals at Oberlin College provided Mary Church Terrell with excellent training for a career on the lecture circuit.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was great interest in public education in the United States, and the Lyceum and Chautauqua movements brought informative and entertaining speakers to nearly all parts of the country.  Speakers bureaus, through directories and magazines, provided biographical information about lecturers and the topics they covered, advertising materials such as posters, and handled financial arrangements. 
Terrell was represented by a number of bureaus throughout her career, and she traveled across the United States and abroad to address diverse audiences – both "colored" and white, small and large. Terrell enjoyed the work, but there were times when the money barely covered her expenses. The travel was grueling and she worried about being away from her young daughters. It pained Terrell to miss her daughter Phyllis's high school graduation ceremony due to a prior commitment to speak in California (CWWW 185).

Queen of the Platform

Terrell received rave reviews from small town newspapers as well as circuit managers.  A South Dakota newspaper hailed her as the “female Booker T. Washington … without a doubt the leading colored woman of the country – beautiful in person, scholarly in mind – of great dignity and grace.” An article in Lyceumite and Talent, a publication of the Chautauqua Managers Association, recounts Terrell's best qualities and commends her skill:

Mrs. Terrell is a convincing as well as captivating speaker.  Her own faith creates faith.  No one who hears her doubts that she means what she says, and that she knows.  She speaks without notes.  She stands on the platform with easy self-reliance. She appeals to the eye and the ear and the heart alike.
 

While Terrell had a repertoire of talks, she never delivered exactly the same speech, but tailored her remarks on the theme to suit the occasion:

Because I practically never used a manuscript when I delivered an address, many thought I spoke extemporaneously.  But this was not the case, and I attempted to disabuse people's minds of this impression.  As a rule, I decided not only what arguments I would make and what facts I would present, but I spent considerable time choosing the language in which my thought should be couched. I took myself very seriously indeed as a public speaker. (CWWW 186)

Regular topics included The Bright Side of a Dark Subject (which she delivered at Oberlin College as a 'Thursday Lecture' in May 1904), Uncle Sam and the Sons of Ham, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and perhaps most frequently requested:  The Progress of Colored Women.



 

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