Lifelong Connections
These women crossed paths many times in the years since they graduated. Terrell almost literally followed in Cooper's footsteps after Oberlin, first to Wilberforce College in Ohio, and later to the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. They taught at the school together until Terrell got married; Cooper later succeeded Robert H. Terrell as principal of the school. In 1892, Terrell and Cooper worked together on chartering the Colored Women’s League, a forerunner of the National Association of Colored Women.
Terrell’s relationship with Gibbs Hunt started in high school, and they remained close. In 1904, the Oberlin Review picked up a Washington Post story which reported on the marriage of Ida Gibbs to William Henry Hunt, a career diplomat, noting that Terrell's daughter Phyllis was a member of the wedding party.
Ida Gibbs Hunt spoke about her friend at a Phyllis Wheatley YWCA Musical and Testimonial Hour honoring Terrell upon the publication of her book A Colored Woman in a White World in 1940, and she wrote another tribute to Terrell shortly after her death in 1954.
