Mary Church Terrell: An Original Oberlin Activist

Outside the District

In 2009 the United States Postal Service featured Mary Church Terrell in the stamp series Civil Rights Pioneers, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Terrell, a charter member of the NAACP, is pictured with Mary White Ovington, one of the co-founders.  This was an honor long in the making.  As far back as 1956 there was a campaign to put Terrell on a postage stamp, for which William Stevenson, then President of Oberlin College, lent his support.

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. 

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