Bettina Aptheker on Mary Church Terrell

“Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, two women who helped shape the main contours of the civil-rights movement in the United States in the twentieth century.”

“Mary Church Terrell, a life-long member of NAWSA and the first Black woman to serve on a board of education anywhere in the United States (she was appointed to the Washington, D.C., Board of Education in 1894), was a frequent speaker at suffrage conventions. Her first such appearance was on February 18, 1898, at the Columbia Theater in Washington, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls, New York, woman's rights convention. Her speech was titled, "The Progress of Colored Women." She began this way: "Fifty years ago a meeting such as this, planned, conducted and addressed by women would have been an impossibility. Less than forty years ago, few sane men would have predicted that either a slave or one of his descendants would in this century at least address such an audience in the nation's capital at the invitation of women representing the highest, broadest, best type of womanhood, that can be found anywhere in the world. Thus to me this semi-centennial of the National American Woman Suffrage Association is a double jubilee, rejoicing as I do, not only in the prospective enfranchisement of my sex but in the emancipation of my race.””