Dignity and Defiance: A Portrait of Mary Church Terrell

(C.R.

Gibbs) Today I would describe as dilapidated.

(Joan Quigley) I think the house as it is now about her, which is very little.

She was Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks.

(violin music) (Raymond Langston) She was in the forefront (C.R.

Gibbs) What we say about is she came in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and joined the ancestors the same year as Brown versus the Board of Education.

(Maybelle Bennett Taylor) I think for those of us what it could be, it represents unfinished business.

So, an incomplete representation of not only who she was and what she meant to us, but an incomplete built representation -of where she lived.

-She grew up with wealth.

She had a command of herself, a presence, and an expectation both of being dignified and of being treated in a certain kind of way.

And Jim Crow wasn't part of the equation.

Mary Church Terrell was able to juggle dignity and defiance because this was the path she had walked in all her life.

She was born in Memphis, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation.

She was the daughter of one of the most well-off African Americans.

(Joan Quigley) Her father was a successful So was the mother with the hair salon.

Apparently both the descendents of former slaves and the white masters.

A man who had been mixed race and enslaved, Robert Church, who had been an absolutely uncanny investor.

(Joan Quigley) He owned a billiard hall He owned brothels in Memphis, and then there was also real estate speculation.

He was able to give his family great luxuries.

As a young girl in Memphis, there wouldn't have been opportunities.

Up in Ohio there were.

When she was very young her mother sent her up to go to school in Ohio, first in Yellow Springs and then up in Oberlin.

The abolitionist stronghold is particularly Oberlin.

As a young African American girl she could go to schools and not be segregated.

Achievement was so important to her.

So there were two other African American women in her class, she wasn't the only, but still, before them, there were maybe 30.

So she was in a very rarified group of college educated African American women.

To Robert Church, it was essential that he demonstrate that with all of his wealth and influences, his daughter did not have to work, that she could pursue intellectual or artistic pursuits.

She did not have to get out and run the slightest danger of encountering a broom, a pot, or a pan.

He always had high hopes for her.

She studied in Europe for two years and started in Paris, then went to Luzerne, and Berlin, and ended in Italy.

She was there the shortest period of time.

So I think she learned some Italian.

She kept an extensive diary in German, and was clearly proficient in German and French as well.

This was something she wanted to do and her father agreed to it.

He had the sense very much rooted in the 19th century notions of patriarchy about a woman's place, and--but the one place he did not want her was in the working--in the workaday world.

He did not want his daughter to have to do that.

Her explanation was that she really wanted to work and she had a college education.

And this tension plays out with her over the years.

He underestimated Mary's desire to create her own path.

And so, they would occasionally clash over this, but he assumed a kind of fatherly understanding and let his daughter blossom.

(Joan Quigley) This is the late 1880s.

She wanted to work, and teaching was one of the few opportunities she had.

So she came to Washington to teach.

Washington had segregated public schools, and there was an accomplished, an important high school in Washington called the Preparatory High School.

And the people who were teaching there included one of her Oberlin classmates and her future husband, Robert Terrell, who had graduated from Harvard the same day she graduated from Oberlin.

He came from very modest means.

His parents also were slaves in Virginia, and the family came to Washington, D.C. at some point.

He really didn't start school until he was maybe nine or ten years old.

He went up to Boston after high school to get a job, to work, and the work he had was working as a waiter in a then-new dining hall at Harvard.

Apparently, students recognized his potential and encouraged him to keep going.

So, he did, he studied somewhere else for a year and then in 1880 enrolled at Harvard as an undergraduate.

And four years later, when he graduated inside Sanders Theatre he was one of the commencement speakers after having waited tables at the other end of the building.

The atmosphere for them as colleagues was that they were the role models who were teaching the next generation who would then go on to college.

And in terms of the dynamic between the two of them, he was a catch.

He was nationally known before he even graduated.

They gradually fell in love at the Preparatory School for Colored Youth, and so much to the extent that the children noticed.

(Joan Quigley) Someone kidded her like, "How are you ever going to find a husband?"

And the underlying assumption being that there can't be any other African American men who will know Greek and Latin, and of course, she found a man who did, who had studied exactly those things at Harvard.

(C.R.

Gibbs) In 1891, she marries They will soon have wedded bliss at 326 T Street Northwest.

There's a section in her book where she talks about the fact that she discovered that, "I could find furniture at an auction, a well-known auction."

Many of the things that you see around this house were hers and came from the house on T Street.

(C.R.

Gibbs) The home life of the Terrells At the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, the home of the black intelligentsia here in the nation's capital.

And she and Judge Terrell had lots of very interesting connections within the neighborhood.

(Raymond Langston) In LeDroit Park she was one of the prominent leaders in the community.

She is in a rarified group as a college educated woman and she came from a progressive, liberal Oberlin background and she wanted to do, and that came out throughout her life.

As a woman, as a feminist, as someone who supported suffrage, she wasn't happy being at home.

She wasn't happy not doing or not working.

Mary Church Terrell, once she got married in 1891, she couldn't be a teacher.

That was considered unseemly.

So, this opened up an opportunity for her to take her well connections, her good connections, and her obvious and already renowned love of education, and she became the first African American woman, certainly the earliest that we are aware of, to be a member of the school board on which she would serve two terms.

Mrs. Terrell was an advocate for children and she wrapped her duties around the advocacy, the promotion, and development of education for young black folk.

She had a miscarriage and left Washington for the summer, and they wrote a lot of letters back and forth.

They had tried several times to have children.

(mellow music) National Association of Colored Women is a national organization, African American club women.

They all met in a convention here in Washington in July of 1896.

They'd had various different entities under different names, but out of that convention emerged one unified group called the National Association of Colored Women and they elected Mary Church Terrell to be the first president.

The timing of it in July of 1896 was two months after the Supreme Court released its Plessy versus Ferguson decision, which was the pronouncement from the Supreme Court that upheld separate but equal.

It became the basis of separate but equal.

She comes out as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and within a few days of the convention, the women went to Harpers Ferry and stood for a photograph outside John Brown's Fort, and they're wearing dresses and holding parasols.

And they called it a pilgrimage in their documents.

It's a very resonant moment.

It's as if they are planting themselves in the tradition of John Brown who had tried to spark a slave rebellion in 1859 at that location in Harpers Ferry.

And then she becomes, as president of the NACW, and going forward through the years, she emerges as a very public person.

In her first speech at the NACW, she said that African American women are going to be partners in progress and reform.

That's more than 10 years before the NAACP even got started.

(C.R.

Gibbs) During the big march in there were southern delegations of white women who did not want black women to have any role.

And there were black women at the same time who inserted themselves in the parade or marched toward the rear of the parade.

These things represent the nascent desire of black women to be part of the American political process, an action that they had every right to do.

And they were not going to wait on the acceptance of white women.

What Mary Church Terrell did is to build bridges toward leaders of the white suffragettes movement.

(Joan Quigley) She took controversial stances.

She was a champion of racial equality.

Her husband, on the other hand, was trying, as a Washington lawyer in residence, to get appointments, political patronage appointments from-- they were both Republicans-- from Republican presidents.

So, there's a tension.

So, Robert Terrell was appointed to a municipal judgeship in Washington in 1901 by President Theodore Roosevelt.

(C.R.

Gibbs) When he gets the appointment he recognizes that it comes with strings attached.

(Joan Quigley) In August of 1906, discharged without honor 167 African American troops who allegedly had been involved in a racial disturbance.

Mary Church Terrell and others spoke out.

And that was the beginning of a clear sense that what she was doing as an activist-- speaking out, directly and indirectly criticizing the Roosevelt administration for its treatment of these African American troops who were never given a trial, never had any kind of due process before being discharged.

She then is associated with an activist tradition.

So there's that tension between them as well.

So there's the tension he has internally about wanting to be an activist but being restricted by needing a political job, a political appointment in terms of what he can really say and what he has to not speak out about.

And then there's a tension I think that develops between them.

She's a feminist.

She's never going to be happy at home.

And so she found a way to have a career.

On the other hand, by speaking out on controversial topics, that reverberates back toward him.

(soft music) There's a story that at one of his visits to the home, Booker T. Washington essentially, and I'm modernizing the language, basically tried to tell Judge Terrell to put his wife in check.

Well, that wasn't going to happen.

You know, what else you got?

But he was extremely supportive, and their letters-- she could be a handful even when she wasn't there.

They had a very warm relationship.

It sort of leaps off the page in their correspondence.

You can see there's great affection between them.

You can see that they were intellectually equal.

You can see sort of a shared joy and interest in things political and in civil rights.

Um, on the other hand, he had to get reappointed by Woodrow Wilson, for example, who came into power in 1913 and his administration segregated federal employees in the district.

But on the other side of the equation, for African Americans in D.C., for Mary Church Terrell, his wife, segregation is getting worse around the country and particularly in Washington.

Mary, in her case, tried not to do it too much, because she understood that her husband's job, you know, depended on a certain amount of reticence.

But there were, again, as I say, times that they did speak out.

There are references throughout the correspondence, maybe in journals, to her concern about him and alcohol.

And it started within a year of their marriage.

She wanted him to exercise, she wanted him to eat well, she wanted him to abstain from alcohol, and stay close to her in the evenings.

(C.R.

Gibbs) This was still the age of men often withdrawing after a dinner with the ladies to an area where they could smoke and become reacquainted with spirituous beverages.

(Raymond Langston) It's a little globe, and he kept his little bourbon in it.

It's a bone china, you open it, you'll see it has a little decanter in there and then little cups that he would take his sips out of.

These were ways that he could relax and discuss the issues of the day.

She was obviously concerned.

On the other hand, she drank very little, and she was very progressive about her own health.

She exercised, she watched what she ate.

And that theme about how he cared for himself came through in correspondence throughout the years.

Her letters are lists of instructions for him to do to take care of the two girls.

When we look at their letters, there are sometimes sly inferences and sometimes, again, direct expressions of love and the emotions behind love, such as when she refers to him as "Hubbykins."

They're cute and this shows that underneath the responsibility and the race work there was love between Robert and Mary.

(Joan Quigley) She went out on She was nationally and ultimately, internationally known as a public speaker and writer.

She also wanted, I believe, to bring focus on the fact that in the capital city of a nation that prided itself on being the land of the free and the home of the brave you could find the rankest, most disheartening racism.

(Joan Quigley) And that included speaking out And when she made controversial remarks and they were in the headlines in newspapers around the country, southern politicians in Washington, no doubt, were aware of what she was saying.

But somehow, until his death in the mid 1920s, her husband managed to be reappointed every four years by every president and reconfirmed by every Senate.

It's really remarkable.

(C.R.

Gibbs) It's only within the last years he becomes paralyzed on one side, and then of course, he passes away in 1925.

From the time that her husband passed, she had more time to throw herself into the public arena to speak out on race issues.

During Reconstruction, for a very brief time, Washington actually had its own little, like, city council, a local legislature, and as part of Reconstruction, this legislature passed laws that said no discrimination.

They were anti-discrimination ordinances.

No discrimination by race in public accommodations, in Washington, D.C., and that included restaurants.

So that's early 1870s, and there were a couple of them so they were known as the anti-discrimination laws.

They made it a misdemeanor for restaurants to refuse to serve.

A lot of people didn't even know that the ordinances still existed, and they did.

They were technically still on the books for decades.

They'd never been repealed.

They were just there but ignored.

The idea she... and others working with her had was to revive these old ordinances, these old laws by going into a restaurant and forcing the issue.

When she becomes part of the Thompson restaurant case she remembers the old laws.

Let us go back to these laws, forgotten laws, and say that there was a time in this city when equal opportunity and equal accommodations were the law in the District of Columbia.

(solemn music) While her legal case was going through the courts she and a committee of activists who worked with her targeted the dime stores, targeted the department stores.

And if they didn't negotiate a compromise, then a boycott and pickets began.

(Raymond Langston) One of my duties was to go walk (C.R.

Gibbs) Mrs. Terrell, when she did just about anything, when she taught, when she lectured, when she wrote, when she traveled, was the epitome of class and elegance.

She understood that she was representing her race, and no one would find her lacking in that regard, no one.

And I just remember her being very kind.

She was always dressed immaculately.

That was one of her main requirements.

You go out of the house, you had to be properly dressed, at all times.

She insisted upon that, with everybody in the family as well as with the people that were picketing with her.

(C.R.

Gibbs) It was important for that to demonstrate their femininity as well as their iron resolve to break the back of Jim Crow in their own communities.

(Joan Quigley) And then the idea was that in the 1950s, Washington, D.C. restaurants cannot have Jim Crow counters and they can't refuse to serve African American customers.

So that's what she was trying to do.

Hecht's, 7th and F Street, the building is still there and it was a prominent local department store with a segregated lunch counter in its flagship store in the basement in the heart of Washington's commercial district.

And so she took them on.

I remember particularly outside of Hecht's Department Store.

It was very quiet, and mostly middle age and upper age people.

All professionals walking together quietly with their signs picketing.

Eight months after this boycott at Hecht's Department Store, eventually, the store folded and said, "We will now integrate," and a few days later she went and had her lunch at the lunch counter.

(soft music) The manager who had previously said, "No, you and your colleagues can't eat here because it's our company policy not to serve you."

When she went back after the Supreme Court's decision he carried her tray.

The symbolic importance was huge, because what the Supreme Court was saying was that a segregated capital was wrong.

And that was incredibly important and meaningful to Mary Church Terrell, who'd lived in Washington for decades, and to a generation of activists who had come of age with segregation in Washington and who had focused on Washington for that very reason.

Washington, D.C. is the symbol of the democracy.

It's the capital, it's everyone's capital, and yet for decades, it had had-- it had observed the Southern practice of Jim Crow in public places.

She started her challenge in January of 1950.

That was six years before Rosa Parks and the bus boycott.

She was doing this a decade before sit-ins across the South.

Her case paved the way to Brown and the Civil Rights Movement that we think of in the South after Brown in the '50s and 1960s.

And yet, she's been largely overlooked by history.

And, uh, there are incredibly important aspects of the Civil Rights Movement after Brown that have been preserved.

But she has been sort of forgotten by history, and I think the current state of her house reflects that.

(Maybelle Bennett Taylor) It feels incomplete Physically, it looks like a half of a house, and in the neighborhood, that's what it has been called, half a house, a half house.

And it did have another part to it prior to there being a fire sometime between the 1940s and the 1950s.

Robert Reed Church owned something like six or seven buildings in the LeDroit Park neighborhood.

The conveyance of the deed actually says Mary Church Terrell.

It went from Robert Reed Church to Mary Church Terrell.

I think part of the impetus for my involvement had to do with the role that I was playing at Howard.

And one of the things that Howard was doing in the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000 was taking a look at all of the vacant and boarded properties we owned and deciding that we are needing to change our presence in the LeDroit Park community.

Among the vacant and boarded properties we had was the property that had been conveyed to us by Mary Church Terrell in the 1951 codicil of her will.

It is in fact one of the few remaining reminders of the storied past of African Americans in Washington, D.C. in general and LeDroit Park in particular.

The house itself served as a beacon.

Not only was it a loving family circle, a hearth of kinship as it were for the Terrell family, but also, it represented a salon in and of itself.

A place where similarly well-situated blacks from around the country as well as in the city could come and talk, and strategize as well.

We did not just go from slavery to Martin Luther King and to where we are today.

We had all along the way successes and made progress in almost every endeavor that we touched.

And so--and she certainly played a big role in inspiring other people, including me.

When you look at what she accomplished and what people of her stature accomplished, they were our original mentors.

And so, we learn by example how to follow in their footsteps.

She was a woman who-- born in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, died in the year of Brown-- her life was the Civil Rights Movement before Brown.

I would like to see that building become a welcoming presence in the neighborhood.

That's important because it is a coming together.

It's the telling of a story, our story, everyone's story.

We need to continue the intention to preserve her legacy and that of her husband.

(C.R.

Gibbs) Mary Church Terrell represents who sought and represents the search for excellence.

To her give the city and herself and her people, her race, and her nation the very best, the very best that she could possibly do.

326 should be saved.

I hope it will be saved, because it is a relic of a past that very much more needs to be better known.

(violin music) (orchestral music)