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• 1 2018-10-05T16:01:11+00:00 Setting the Record Straight 6 plain 2018-10-05T17:36:50+00:00

  As early as 1921 representatives from the Government met to begin planning a bicentennial celebration to honor George Washington.  A commission was appointed in 1924 and Washingtonians were especially excited about participating in the year-long bicentennial celebration.  Mary Church Terrell saw this as the perfect opportunity to memorialize the association between George Washington and a woman she had come to adore, Phillis Wheatley.

  Perhaps Terrell's interest in Wheatley was kindled through her membership in various women's clubs and through association with Sylvanie F. Williams, one of the vice-presidents of the National Association of Colored Women at its founding. An educator from New Orleans, Williams founded a Phillis Wheatley club in 1896. The Club's work caught the the attention of the press and of Mary Church Terrell, who praised it when she addressed the American Women Suffrage Association in 1898 in Washington, D. C. There was also a resurgence of interest in Phillis Wheatley that began about 1849 and kept a steady pace with a flurry of activities throughout the 1890s.  For instance, the "Negro" women of Allegheny, Pennsylvania commissioned a bust of Phillis Wheatley from famed sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. Schools and clubs were named in Wheatley’s honor. Trees were planted in her name at Arbor Day celebrations and the printing of an article that cited Wheatley as the first person to pay tribute to George Washington in verse appeared in newspapers across the nation. And when Mary Church Terrell gave birth in 1898 she named her daughter for the famous poet.
  
  The five years leading up to the bicentennial witnessed many tributes in honor of George Washington during the month of February.  As the phrase "first in peace and honors" was frequently repeated in the February 1929 celebrations, Mary Church Terrell worked to set the record straight in an article published in the Evening Star on March 10th, informing readers that

  During the recent celebration of Washington's birthday he was frequently referred to as "first in peace."  It is quite probable that not one of the many who thus eulogized the Father of His Country knew that a little black girl--an African but a few years removed from the land of her birth--was the first person to confer this title upon him.  It was Phyllis Wheatley, a young African poetess, who wrote a poem in his honor and in one of the lines, addressed him as ‘first in peace and honors’ several years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

  Terrell further points out that Wheatley

  was a full-blooded African, so that her talent and attainments cannot be attributed to the mixture of Caucasian or any other blood in her veins. If any other human being, black, white, yellow or brown, has ever made such marvelous intellectual progress and achieved such literary success in such a short time under similar circumstances as Phyllis Wheatley did, the records of history do not show it.

   
  Being a keen strategist, Mary Church Terrell, as a member of the Committee of the District of Columbia George Washington Bicentennial Commission, decided to write a pageant for the bicentennial that would feature Wheatley’s tribute to the first president. Terrell helped to organize events and lectures to illuminate Wheatley's accomplishments. On June 11, 1932 she gave the main address at Lincoln Congregational Temple where under the “auspices of the Bicentennial Commission of the District of Columbia” Phyllis Wheatley Day was celebrated. And on November 19, 1932, the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant written by Terrell was presented in the auditorium of the Armstrong High School in Washington, D. C.  Regrettably when the George Washington Bicentennial Commission issued its four volume history the Phillis Wheatley Pageant was not included.