Mary Church Terrell - Suitland, MD - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

Mary Church Terrell was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1863 (the middle of the U.S. Civil War). Both of her parents were entrepreneurs: her father owned a bank and did substantial real estate investing and her mother owned a hair salon. In fact, her father, Robert Reed Church is believed to be the first black millionaire in the South.

Being rather well off, Mary Church was able to attend high school in Oberlin, OH where she continued her education at Oberlin College. She earned a bachelor’s degree in the Classics (1884) and a master’s degree in Education (1888), one of the first black women to attain that level of education. After a couple of years teaching in Ohio, Mary Church moved to Washington DC to teach Latin at DC’s M Street school. Here she met her future husband, Robert H. Terrell who was also a teacher at that school.

While at Oberlin, Mary Church Terrell had been exposed to Susan B. Anthony and her Women’s Suffrage movement which would have an impact throughout her life. After her marriage to Robert Terrell, she stopped teaching and became more focused on writing and her involvement in various women’s clubs, suffrage and civil rights organizations, several of which she had established herself. In 1909, she was invited to participate in the first organizational meeting of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and thus became one of the founding members.

Mary Church Terrell’s list of friends and associates reads like a Who’s Who of late nineteenth and early twentieth century social activism: Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper and Alice Paul among many others. She was a prolific writer having written over a dozen books and biographies and published innumerable articles for a variety of newspapers and magazines. She was also fluent in French, German and Italian.

Terrell’s personal life was marred with some tragedy. Two of her children died in infancy, another via miscarriage and her husband died in 1925 after suffering a series of debilitating stokes over the course of several years. By my calculations, that means she was a widow for about thirty years.
(Sources: wikipedia.com, biography.com.)

Description: See long description above. Date of birth: 09/23/1863 Date of death: 07/24/1954 Area of notoriety: Other Marker Type: Headstone Setting: Outdoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: office hours: 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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