Mary Burnett Talbert - Buffalo, NY
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Rayman
N 42° 53.183 W 078° 52.044
17T E 674147 N 4750404
Mary Burnett Talbert was one of the most committed, versatile and tireless champions of social and political reform for race relations, anti-lynching, and women’s rights.
Waymark Code: WM1M2E
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 05/29/2007
Views: 78
Born in Ohio in 1866, Mary Talbert graduated from Oberlin College before moving to Little Rock, AK to teach. When she arrived in Buffalo in 1891 as the wife of prominent real estate broker William H. Talbert, she already had earned distinction as the first Black high school principal in the state of Arkansas.
In 1899, as a member of the Michigan Street Baptist Church, Talbert helped found the Phyllis Wheatley Club, the city’s first affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC).
She also played a pivotal role in the advent of the Niagara Movement. In 1905, she opened her Michigan Avenue home to W.E.B. DuBois and 27 others for a secret planning meeting of the famous civil rights summit.
By 1910 Talbert was lecturing nationally and internationally. In 1916 she became president of the NACWC, and during her two terms was instrumental in the restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home in Anacostia, Maryland. She also was president, vice president and director of the NAACP, and as chairman of its Anti-Lynching Committee lobbied nationally for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. During World War I, she assisted with war loan drives, and became a Red Cross nurse with the American expeditionary forces in France. A year before her death in 1922, Talbert became the first African American woman to receive the prestigious NAACP Spingarn Award. She rests today in Forest Lawn Cemetery and Garden Mausoleum.
Source: Buffalo/Niagara African-American Heritage Guide
Civil Right Type: Not listed
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