Getting the Word Out
As a colored woman, I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. Unless I happened to know colored people who live here or ran across a colored man or woman who could recommend a colored boarding house or hotel to me, I should be obliged to spend the night wandering around. Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and representatives of other dark races can find hotel accommodations, as a rule, if they can pay for them…
As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House ravenously hungry and supplied with money to purchase a meal without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food if it was patronized by white people, unless I were willing to sit behind a screen. And in some places I would not be allowed to do even that. (CWWW 383-384)
“Stay out of Hecht's,” a handbill issued by the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D. C. Anti-Discrimination Laws in the early 1950’s, encouraged “fair minded Americans” to boycott the well-known department store’s lunch counter as it violated an 1873 D. C. law forbidding discrimination in restaurants. "Stop, Please Do Not Go into Murphy's," as another handbill issued by the Committee read, became a battle cry against the chain of five and dime stores located in the District. Although Hecht's backed off from its discriminatory practice after a series of demonstrations, Murphy's refused. In response, Mary Church Terrell and the Coordinating Committee accelerated the demonstrations against the five and dime with a series of scheduled protests that took place on Thursdays from seven to nine p.m. and Saturdays from eleven to five p.m. The demonstrations garnered neighboring support from Virginians who along with the Richmond NAACP joined the picket lines one Saturday in July 1952 "to dramatize their conviction that the Nation's Capital should set an example to other cities by ending discrimination."
In 1986, Juanita Setzer, an NAACP volunteer, reminisced about "standing with Mrs. Terrell, who was still walking the picket lines at age 90. Mary Church Terrell was one of the bravest women I've ever known. She was just some kind of woman. One of the last times I was with her was out on the picket lines, and her back had become hunched and she was a little slower, but she was still out there fighting. She was something else indeed." (Winston Salem Chronicle, Thursday, February 6, 1986, Winston Salem, North Carolina.)
