Mary Church Terrell

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863, the daughter of parents who had been enslaved until the Civil War's close. Her father, Robert Reed Church Sr., rose from bondage to become one of the first Black millionaires in the American South, and the comfort of her upbringing set her apart even as the color line hemmed her in. She was sent north for her schooling and entered Oberlin College, earning a bachelor's degree in the classics in 1884 and a master's in 1888 — a rare summit for any woman, and rarer still for a Black woman of her generation.

She built her life as an educator, teaching in the Latin department of Washington's celebrated M Street School. But her calling widened into a lifetime of organized struggle. In 1896 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and became its first national president, giving the movement its enduring charge: "Lifting as we climb." Through the association she pressed for education, dignity, and the vote for Black women who were too often written out of the wider suffrage cause.

In 1909 she stood among the charter members of the NAACP, one of the few women present at its creation. She marched for the ballot — joining the 1913 suffrage procession in Washington and refusing the segregation that white organizers sought to impose — and she carried her testimony abroad, addressing international audiences in French, German, and English. Her pen matched her voice, most searingly in "What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States."

Age never dimmed her. In her eighties she took up the desegregation of Washington's restaurants, and in 1953 the Supreme Court affirmed that the capital's segregated eating places were unlawful — a victory won barely a year before her death on July 24, 1954. Mary Church Terrell climbed a lifetime, and lifted a people as she rose.