Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell. , A champion of racial and gender equality, Mary Church was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis to business owners Louisa and Robert R. Church. "Mollie,” as she was called, earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College, taught for two years, and studied in Europe. , After her 1891 marriage to Robert H, Terrell, she had to resign her post in a Washington school because married women were barred from teaching. A year later, she learned that her friend Thomas Moss, an owner of People's Grocery, had been lynched in Memphis, so she and Frederick Douglass appealed to President Harrison to condemn lynching., She became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1897, which promoted woman suffrage and worked to end lynching and Jim Crow laws. A member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt. Terrell attended the biennial meetings in 1898 and 1900, where she explained that Black women had to confront both racial and sexual barriers. With members of the National Woman's Party, she and her daughter, Phillis picketed the White House. She was a charter member of the NAACP in 1909. At the age of 85, she broke the color bar in the American Association of University Women. , An author. Terrell used writing to advance her social and political agenda, and her autobiography, Black Woman in a White World (1940), describes her experiences with racism and sexism. In her late 80s, she battled to end segregation in Washington DC public facilities. Known as mother of the sit-in, she invented strategies later used in the civil rights movement.,

"Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear."

, Mary Church Terrell died on Jan 24, 1954, two months after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public book was unconstitutional.