Not only are colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are everywhere baffled and mocked on account of their race…Desperately and continuously they are forced to fight that opposition, born of a cruel, unreasonable prejudice which neither their merit nor their necessity seems able to subdue.

Mary Church Terrell, "The Progress of Colored Women," February 18, 1898.
African-American Perspectives, 1818-1907.

Mary Church Terrell
ca. 1880-1900.
"Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Mary Church Terrell—educator, political activist, and first president of the National Association of Colored Women—was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee. An 1884 graduate of Oberlin College, America's first college to admit women and amongst the first to admit students of all races, Terrell was one of the first American women of African descent to graduate from college. She earned her master's degree from Oberlin in 1888.

Terrell began her career as a teacher. After her marriage to Washington lawyer Robert Terrell, she became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association where she became a spokesperson for the particular concerns of African-American women. A passionate advocate of education, Terrell sold her speeches during this period in order to raise money for a kindergarten.

Black women's groups were routinely excluded from national women's organizations during the late nineteenth century. It was their exclusion from participation in the planning of the 1893 World's Fair, however, that spurred Terrell and other black women leaders to form the National Association of Colored Women, organized in 1896. Also known as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, it was created to serve as an umbrella organization for black women's groups throughout the country. Under Terrell's leadership, the NACW worked to achieve social and educational reform and to end discrimination based on gender and race.

Oberlin College Student Body and Faculty in Front of Memorial Hall,
Oberlin, Ohio, 1906.
Taking the Long View, 1851-1991

• Learn more about the work of African-American educators and reformers. Browse the subject index of African American Perspectives, 1818-1907, particularly the subheading on African-American women which appears as Afro-American women.
• Search the collection Words and Deeds in American History on the keywords African American to retrieve items such as a chapter from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
• Learn more about the history of the struggle for civil rights in the exhibition African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
• Search the Today in History Archive on suffrage or civil rights to learn about more events and leaders in the struggles for women's right to vote and civil rights for people of color.