Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), the daughter of former slaves, was a national leader for civil rights and women’s suffrage. Her activism was sparked in 1892 when one of her childhood friends was lynched by white business owners in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Terrell joined the anti-lynching movement and the suffrage movement as a passionate writer and educator, and focused her life’s work on racial uplift — the belief that Black people could end racial discrimination and advance themselves through education and community activism. In 1896, she helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), coining the organization’s motto, “Lifting As We Climb,” and served as its president from 1896 to 1901. She was also a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Church Terrell was one of the first African American women to earn both a Bachelor and a Master’s degree, and in 1895, she served on the Washington, D.C. school board, becoming the first Black woman to serve on a board of education in the United States. She led the movement to integrate restaurants and stores in D.C., organizing some of the first sit-ins at segregated restaurants at age 86, and instigating the groundbreaking 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. J.R. Thompson’s Co. Inc., which outlawed discrimination in public places in the nation’s capital. Interviewees: historian Treva B. Lindsey, Associate Professor Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University, and author of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C.; activist, educator, writer, and member of the Ferguson Commission, Brittany Packnett Cunningham.
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