Writer
Almost immediately after she stopped teaching, Terrell began working as a writer for a variety of publications - newspapers, magazines, and journals - and she wrote poems and short stories as well as non-fiction.
Under the pen name Euphemia Kirk she wrote "The Women's World" column in The Colored American, a weekly newspaper based in Washington, D.C., which published from 1893 to 1904. In her first column in 1900, Kirk lets readers know that they can expect her to cover subjects of interest to women - namely men and fashion - however, she proves that she will do so with a keen intelligence and a sharp wit. She skewers the notion that a woman's happiness depends on finding the "Right Man," and says of the necessity of dressing well: "Don't tell me there's nothing in appearance. There's everything in it."
In 1902 Terrell was a contributor to Twentieth Century Negro Literature; or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro, by One Hundred of America's Greatest Negroes. While she could easily have addressed any of the 38 topics, it is appropriate that Terrell wrote one of the four papers responding to the question: "What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play in the Uplifting of Her Race?"
Terrell wrote regularly for The Voice of the Negro, which published from 1904 to 1907 and dealt with politics as well as arts and letters. Articles by Terrell in this journal include "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor" (1905), "Paul Laurence Dunbar" (1906), and "Susan B. Anthony, The Abolitionist" (1906).
In 1904 Terrell's essay "Lynching From a Negro's Point of View" was published in The North American Review, the first literary magazine in the United States, and one of the few white establishment periodicals to accept her work. This piece is a forceful rebuttal to "Lynching of Negroes: Its Cause and Its Prevention," by Thomas Nelson Page, which appeared six months earlier. Page was a writer known for his works glorifying the Old South. Terrell, who had been deeply disturbed by the lynching of her childhood friend Thomas Moss, in Memphis, Tennessee in 1892, discredits Page's assertion that lynching was a reaction to the rape of white women, and argues that the heinous practice will not end until the "masses of ignorant white people in that section [i.e. the South] are educated and lifted to a higher moral plane." Further, Terrell says, all classes of white people must learn respect for the rights of all human beings as well as a "holy reverence for the law."
Two of Terrell's other widely known essays, "Plea for the White South by a Coloured Woman" (1906) and "Peonage in the United States: The Convict Lease System and the Chain Gangs" (1907), were published in Nineteenth Century and After, a British magazine that focused on debates in public policy, history, literature, and religion.
Terrell was repeatedly rejected by white establishment publishers in the United States - for her fiction as well as non-fiction - and she was forced to self-publish her autobiography A Colored Woman in a White World with Ransdell, a vanity press, at significant cost. The promotional brochure for the book prominently features the fact that noted English author H.G. Wells wrote the preface.
