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Turn of the Century · Civil Rights

Mary Church Terrell

1863 – 1954

Educator, suffragist, and civil rights activist; first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a charter member of the NAACP.

Mary Church Terrell, three-quarter-length portrait, seated and facing the camera, between 1880 and 1900
Unidentified photographer, between 1880 and 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Mary Church Terrell spent more than six decades attacking the twin barriers she named as race and sex. An Oberlin-trained educator, she became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, a charter member of the NAACP, and a suffragist who picketed the White House — and in her eighties she led the sit-ins and lawsuit that ended legal segregation in the restaurants of the nation’s capital.

At a Glance

Born
23 September 1863, Memphis, Tennessee
Died
24 July 1954, Annapolis, Maryland
Birth name
Mary Eliza Church
Known for
First president of the National Association of Colored Women (1896–1901); A Colored Woman in a White World (1940); the Thompson Restaurant case (1950–1953)
HBCU ties
Wilberforce University (Taught for two years before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1887)
Fields
Civil Rights · Organizing · Education
Era
Turn of the Century

Early Life

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on 23 September 1863, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayres Church, both formerly enslaved. Her father became a wealthy real estate investor and is often described as one of the South’s first Black millionaires; her mother ran a hair salon. Her parents divorced while she was a child. Known to her family as Mollie, she grew up with economic security that was rare for Black Americans of her generation, but not with protection from the color line.

Her parents sent her north to school, first to the model school attached to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then to Oberlin Academy and Oberlin College. She chose the demanding classical course usually reserved for men and earned a B.A. in 1884, followed by an M.A. from Oberlin in 1888. She then spent about two years studying and traveling in Europe, where she became fluent in French and German — skills she would later use on an international stage.

Life and Work

Over her father’s objections, Church went to work. She taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio and in 1887 joined the faculty of the M Street Colored High School in Washington, D.C., later Dunbar High School, where her colleagues included Anna Julia Cooper. In 1891 she married Robert Heberton Terrell, who had chaired the school’s language department and later became a municipal court judge in the District. Because married women could not teach in the District’s schools, she resigned. The couple had one daughter and later adopted a second.

In 1892 Thomas Moss, a friend from Memphis, was lynched by a white mob because his grocery competed with a white-owned store. The murder, which also launched Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade, turned Terrell toward activism. After she and Frederick Douglass appealed without success to President Benjamin Harrison to condemn lynching publicly, she helped organize the Colored Women’s League of Washington. In 1896 the League joined with other clubs to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and Terrell became its first president, serving until 1901. The association took as its motto “Lifting as We Climb” and built kindergartens, day nurseries, and mothers’ clubs across the country.

Terrell served on the District of Columbia Board of Education from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911. She addressed the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1898 and 1900, insisting that white suffragists confront the double burden Black women carried. In 1904, at the International Council of Women in Berlin, she delivered her address in German. In 1909 she was among the founders and charter members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1910 she co-founded the College Alumnae Club, later the National Association of University Women.

A committed Republican, Terrell led the Women’s Republican League in Washington and worked for the party among Black women voters. She picketed the Wilson White House with the National Woman’s Party for the vote, and after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment turned her attention to broader civil rights. In 1940 she published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. In 1948, after a legal fight, she won admission to the Washington branch of the American Association of University Women, breaking its color bar.

Her last campaign was her most direct. On 28 February 1950, at age 86, Terrell and several colleagues entered Thompson’s Restaurant near the White House and were refused service. As chair of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws, she argued that forgotten statutes of 1872 and 1873 still required Washington’s restaurants to serve all well-behaved customers. While the resulting lawsuit moved through the courts, she led boycotts, pickets, and sit-ins at downtown lunch counters and department stores. On 8 June 1953, in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the old laws, ending legal segregation in the capital’s eating places.

Legacy

Terrell lived to see Brown v. Board of Education decided in May 1954. She died on 24 July 1954, at age 90, near her summer home in Highland Beach, Maryland. Her home at 326 T Street NW in Washington survives as a reminder of her long residence in the city she worked to desegregate. Her papers are held at the Library of Congress and at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

Historians have increasingly treated Terrell not as a genteel clubwoman but as what her biographer Alison M. Parker calls an “unceasing militant.” Her career links the club movement of the 1890s, the suffrage struggle, and the direct-action tactics of the 1950s, and it shows how Black women built the organizational foundations on which the later civil rights movement stood. Her Thompson campaign, conducted through sit-ins and pickets years before the Greensboro lunch-counter protests of 1960, is now read as an early model of the nonviolent direct action that younger activists would carry across the South.

For Educators

Terrell’s sixty-year career links the Black women’s club movement, the suffrage struggle, and the direct-action protests of the 1950s, showing how long campaigns for civil rights were built. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 23 September 1863 Born in Memphis, Tennessee.
  2. 1884 Earns a B.A. from Oberlin College; M.A. follows in 1888.
  3. 1887 Joins the faculty of the M Street Colored High School in Washington, D.C.
  4. 1891 Marries Robert Heberton Terrell.
  5. 1892 Lynching of her friend Thomas Moss in Memphis turns her toward activism.
  6. 1896 Becomes first president of the National Association of Colored Women.
  7. 1904 Addresses the International Council of Women in Berlin in German.
  8. 1909 Charter member of the NAACP.
  9. 28 February 1950 Refused service at Thompson’s Restaurant, launching a test case.
  10. 8 June 1953 Supreme Court decides District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., ending segregated dining in the capital.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, D.C.: Ransdell, 1940).
  2. Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
  3. Joan Quigley, Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
  4. National Park Service, “Mary Church Terrell.” Link
  5. Debra Michals, “Mary Church Terrell,” National Women’s History Museum, 2017. Link
  6. Tyina Steptoe, “Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954),” BlackPast.org, 2007. Link
  7. Library of Congress, Mary Church Terrell Papers. Link

Related on Black-History.com

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Black-History.com Editors. “Mary Church Terrell.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/mary-church-terrell/.
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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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