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On her dad's side, Mary's great-grandmother Lucy was impregnated by her white owner. Lucy's daughter Emmaline, Mary's grandmother, got pregnant after she'd been "shared" with a friend of her slaveholder. A white relative said Lucy was the family seamstress and, "Never in life was she treated like a slave."  

Among the incidents this relative seemed to have forgotten—the slaveholder selling Lucy away from young daughter Emmaline.

Babies born to enslaved women became the property of the slaveholder. This included Mary until she was freed by the end of the civil war. Following the war, her parents built a middle class life in Memphis, Tennessee.

They wanted the best for Mary, and boarding school in Ohio for a topnotch education. She became one of the first Black women in America to graduate from college earning both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from Oberlin College.  

Then, an atrocious killing launched Mary into the struggle for equal rights.

Mary Church Terrell as a young woman, courtesy Library of Congress.

After college, Mary wanted to work teaching, but her father objected."Most girls run away from home to marry; I ran away to teach," she said.  She taught modern languages at Wilberforce College in Ohio for two years, then moved to Washington DC to teach high school. That's where she felt the full brunt of Jim Crow.

"As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. Unless I happened to know colored people who live here or ran across a chance acquaintance who could recommend a colored boarding-house to me, I should be obliged to spend the entire night wandering about....thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper."

In Washington DC, Mary met lawyer and future judge Robert Terrell, whom she married in 1891. It was shortly after that, she received the horrible news that a childhood friend had been brutally killed in Memphis by a mob of whites. Charles Moss had been part of a co-op grocery owned by a group of prominent African Americans.

The People's Grocery, founded in 1889 in a neighborhood on the edge of Memphis, TN.

The Black-owned grocery prospered and soon became more popular that the white-owned grocery store in the neighborhood. Many whites at the time couldn't stand to see Blacks "stepping out of their place" and when their own commerce or livelihood was threatened, they turned violent.

Shots were fired after an altercation between the white grocery owner and two employees of the People's Grocery. Memphis Judge Julius DuBose, a former Confederate soldier, vowed to form a posse to get the "high-handed rowdies." Blacks holed up in the grocery store anticipating a mob attack.

When whites surrounded the building and burst in the Black men fired, later saying they were unaware it was a raid by law officers. Two policemen were seriously wounded and Thomas Moss was arrested, along with two men who worked at the People's Grocery, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell.

Authorities said the jail was impenetrable, but a mob of seventy white men in masks had little trouble breaking out the black men.

Illustration from the Memphis  The Appeal-Avalanche, (March 10, 1892) 

 "The Mob's Work – Done With Guns, Not Ropes."

The next morning the bodies of Moss, Stewart and McDowell were discovered in a field by the railroad track outside of Memphis. Stewart and McDowell were killed by numerous close-range shotgun blasts to the face, one of them with his hands tied. Moss died from a rifle or pistol shot to the neck. 

Interestingly, local reporters happened to be at the scene of the lynchings. One reported Moss's dying words, "Tell my people to go West, there is no justice for them here."

Illustration from the Memphis  The Appeal-Avalanche, (March 10, 1892) 

 "The Mob's Work – Done With Guns, Not Ropes."

At the news of her friend's lynching, Mary went to Memphis and joined journalist Ida B. Wells in publicizing the atrocity. The lynching sparked national outrage and launched Well's campaign for a federal anti-lynching law.

As you known, this type of extrajudicial killing used to maintain white supremacy in the Southern states was not uncommon, but forces afoot across the country today do not want children to learn this type of American history.

State and local governments and school boards are banning curriculum and books containing information about slavery, lynchings, segregation, prejudice and even picture books about Black children's hair!

The history in particular, they say, makes white students uncomfortable and leaves them feeling guilty about their race. Hold on here a minute...

  A handful of the hundreds of books banned this year in American schools.

If these white students (and parents) feel uncomfortable and guilty when reading about slavery and lynching, I'm thinking they are choosing to identify with the historical racist murderers!

I'm a totally white person, but when I read this type of American history, I feel compassion. I choose to identify with the Black people in the stories. My skin being white does not cause me to identify with slaveholders and lynch mobs. 

PEN America recorded 10,046 instances of book bans in the 2023-2024 school year taking place in 29 states and 220 public school districts, with Florida and Iowa leading in number of bans. Of the most commonly banned books, 44% featured people and characters of color according to PEN America.

If we can't bring ourselves to read American history pertaining to the enslavement and subsequent treatment of African Americans, we will never be able to put ourselves in the shoes of Black Americans today.

If we can't feel compassion for 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the other black boys "lynched" in our time, God help us.

Trayvon Martin at Aviation Camp

Trayvon was followed, shot and killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., on the night of Feb. 26, 2012.  Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in July 2013. Here's a story about how that played out.

See the faces, read the stories of Black men, women and children killed by police in the last ten years here... 

Briefly, I return to the story of Mary Church Terrell, one of the most prominent civil rights activists of her time, which spanned the 1890s to the 1950s.

Mary formed the Colored Women’s League in Washington to address social problems facing black communities and served on Washington’s Board of Education.

She was active in woman's suffrage, the Republican Party, a founding member of the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women. A prolific writer, she published scholarly articles, poems, and short stories advocating racial and gender equality.

A a plaintiff in two different lawsuits, Mary helped integrate the American Association of University Women and the restaurants in Washington DC.

Mary campaigned against racism and sexism into her 90s! It was more than a full-time job for her. It would take thousands of people taking small steps for equality to accomplish as much as she did. But that is totally doable.

If you like my story today, please forward it to family and friends. Soon, I will have it set up so that you can also share to your social media. Thanks!

From Kay: So frightened but daily I keep looking for the bright spots...

From Marguerite: I was aware of the Brennan Center and have supported them, but will...see if I can find a way to actually do something beyond agonizing about our future president...

From Patricia: I really liked your message today and want to help spread the word to take a stand for true democracy.

From Bob: Three strategies to help bring people together (Hinton 2024)
  1. Listen first
  2. Be curious, not dogmatic
  3. Burst out of your bubble

https://theconversation.com/3-strategies-to-help-americans-bridge-the-deepening-partisan-divide-243539

And, of course, there's a book about Mary. Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell by Alison M. Parker. 

I always encourage people to buy books. That is the only way authors can continue to write them. But you can also request a book like this from your library.

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