This article was written by James Spady and published in ScoopUSA Newspaper in March 2017. Spady’s ability to research and reveal African American historical facts is unmatched, and we are blessed to have these articles in our catalogs so we can continue to tell our stories and create our own narrative based on historical facts.
Dedicated to the National Association of Colored Women and Their Role in African-American History
“I am always getting ready to write something, but I am never prepared to begin. I am more like George Eliot’s Casaubon than anybody–either in fiction or out of it with whom I can be compared. If I had lived in a literary atmosphere, or if my time had not been so completely occupied with public work of many varieties, I might have gratified my desires to tell the world a few things I wanted it to know.” …Mary Church Terrell
Decades later, Nellie McKay used the quote above to introduce her readers to an extraordinary Black woman born in the American South as the Civil War was about to subside. She not only lived through what historian Dr. Rayford W. Logan called the Nadir Period, the collapse of the Confederacy during which the rawest, most brutal, and most violent form of white oligarchic power was manifested.
Writing about Mrs. Terrell decades later, Nellie McKay explained, “Mary Church Terrell was almost an octogenarian when she transcribed these words from one of her diaries into her autobiography to write long fiction. But although she lived for another 14 years, in the grand scheme in which one suspects, she saw her life, that wish to write novels, was not to be. For her, such a denial was a loss since the wish to write novels was not a frivolous gesture.”
Providing helpful background for her readers, McKay stated: “For Terrell was the daughter of former slaves, members of a group for whom for more than 200 years the achievement of literacy was mostly by theft, while un-prescribed speech was unequivocally forbidden on pain of cruel and other inhuman consequences, we know too that in the writings of Terrell and many of her peers, the challenges of the word, was to bring force to bear more fully, positively, and powerfully on the lives of Black Americans than their ancestors had been able to do.”
Noted African-American literary critic concluded: “A colored woman in the white world is a text that deserves serious consideration in the Black autobiographical tradition. It has much to teach us about the complexity of Black life in this country, and it helps us to better comprehend the many roles that many Blacks, reformed women and men, played in shaping the politics and that led to the explosions of 1959 and explosions of the 1950s and the 1960s in the Black revolution of this century.”
Her Husband’s Confirmation as Municipal Judge in D.C., Following Lack of Senate Confirmation
Among the many interesting historical accounts present in Mary Church Terrell’s autobiographical narrative is her vivid account of her husband becoming a Municipal Court judge in Washington, D.C.
Terrell wrote: “Every time he was chosen by a pres- ident of the United States to preside as judge over the Municipal Court, my husband had great difficulty in being confirmed by the Senate. This exhibition of racial prejudice directed against Judge Terrell caused me great anguish. To tell you the truth, I suffered much more than my husband, for as I have already indicated, he was an optimist from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. I have never seen a more wonderful exhibition of calm, cool-headed courage, of a faith that amounted to a conviction that somehow or other justice would prevail in the end than that displayed by Judge Terrell.”
Judge Terrell’s quiet and determined confidence won out and he did become the first African-American Municipal Court judge in the city of Washington. Judge and Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, then contributed immeasurably to the emancipation of African Americans in the 20th century, and they should be remembered for having done so.
With Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar at the World’s Fair
Terrell remembered: “The year following the critical illness during which I lost my first baby and came near losing my life, my father invited me to visit the World’s Fair while he and his family were there, and generously paid the expense of the trip. The Midwest Plantation, with all the original denizens and dancers, was something new under the sun, and many perfect ladies who went there to see them perform came away shocked. Compared with what one normally sees on the stage today, however, and what one beheld at the Second World’s Fair, these exotic ladies knew nothing but the ABC of sending thrills down the spines of America’s sightseers by their terpsichorean stunts.”
Turning to the highlights for her, Terrell stated: “But there are two impressions of the World’s Fair which have left a more delightful flavor in my memory than anything else. One was the great honor paid to Frederick Douglass by people of the dominant race as well as those of his own race. The other was meeting Paul Laurence Dunbar just as he was starting his career as a poet. Mr. Douglass was the commissioner in charge of the exhibit from Haiti, and he employed Paul Dunbar to assist. Such a gesture by the elder Douglass toward Dunbar is in the tradition.”
Finally, one of the lasting impacts Mrs. Terrell has on this society was the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
