Outside the District
For many Americans, Mary Church Terrell is less familiar than other leaders of the civil rights era - her autobiography A Colored Woman in a White World was published in 1940, before many of her most notable achievements. That may, however, be changing, as her story is being told anew in Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital by Joan Quigley (2016), and a documentary film Dignity and Defiance: A Portrait of Mary Church Terrell, written, directed, and produced by journalist Robin N. Hamilton (2018).
Terrell's life and approach to fighting for equality for women, children, and her race offer lessons to twenty-first century activists seeking social justice. In a blog post for Perspectives on American History, Joan Quigley mused that Mary Church Terrell is the great-great grandmother of the Black Lives Matter movement.