PARA PAR@ ` ┐TEXT ` ▒Terrell, Mary Eliza Church1863╨1954writer, lecturer, educator, activist and clubwomanBorn in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863, Mary Church was the daughter of Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers Church, both former slaves prominent in Memphis╒s growing black community. Both parents owned small, successful businesses, and they provided ╥Mollie╙ and her brother with advantages that few other African-American children of her time enjoyed. After they divorced, she was sent away at age six to attend the Antioch College Model School in Yellow Springs, Ohio; although she boarded with a black family, she was often the only African-American child in her classes there. After two years she transferred to the Antioch public schools. Meanwhile her mother and brother moved North, and she divided her summers between Memphis and New York City.Determined to excel academically in order to disprove then-widespread theories of racial inferiority, she graduated from public high school in 1879 and entered Oberlin College, where she opted for a rigorous four-year ╥gentlemen╒s course╙ which stressed training in the classics. She often recounted with delight her flawless reading and translation of a Greek text during a visit to the college by Matthew Arnold; informed by her professor that Church was African-American, Arnold expressed surprise, since popular wisdom of the time held that people of African descent were incapable of such learning.Church graduated in 1884 and returned to Memphis, in deference to her father who insisted it was not proper for a woman to enter a profession. Obedient but restless for a year, she began secretly sending out inquiries for teaching positions. Finally she accepted a job as college secretary and faculty member at Wilberforce College; a year later she moved to the M Street High School (later Dunbar High), the African-American high school in Washington, D.C., where she taught Latin.In 1888 she received an M.A. from Oberlin and travelled to Europe, where for two years she toured France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and England and kept journals in both French and German. Upon her return in 1891 she married Robert Terrell, a young Harvard graduate who had worked with her at Dunbar High and who had since earned a law degree in her absence. They settled in Washington. Terrell had three miscarriages there, which she attributed to the poor medical facilities available to African-Americans. During her fourth pregnancy, in 1898, she visited her mother in New York and gave birth there to a healthy baby girl she named Phyllis, after writer Phillis Wheatley. Reacting to the same event that propelled Ida B. Wells╒s anti-lynching campaign╤the 1892 lynching of lifelong friend Tom Moss, another successful Memphis businessman╤Terrell and Frederick Douglass requested an appointment with President Benjamin Harrison and urged him, unsuccessfully, to speak out against racial violence. That same year she helped form the Colored Women╒s League in Washington D.C. In 1896╨97 the League merged with the Federation of Afro-American Women under Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston. The newly formed group, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), elected Terrell its first president. Dedicated to improving the lives of African-Americans, especially women, the NACW set out to challenge discrimination, poverty and injustice nationwide.In her new position Terrell had to deal with many rivalries both in and outside her organization. In 1909 Terrell was one of two African-American women to sign the public call for the formation of the NAACP. Despite her friendship with Booker T. Washington╤she supported the work of Tuskegee Institute, and Washington, its founder, repeatedly helped her husband win reappointment as a federal judge╤Terrell disagreed with Washington╒s accomodationist strategy and became a charter member of the NAACP, a group founded by Washington╒s main critic, W. E. B. DuBois. As NACW president she lectured extensively on racial injustice, lynching, women╒s suffrage, economics, crime and various aspects of African-American history and culture. Serving as a liaison to white women╒s club and suffrage movements, she actively campaigned for women╒s suffrage until the passage of the 19th Amendment. Through the NACW she also represented African-American women in international forums; at the Berlin Congress of Women in 1904, she impressed her audience by delivering her speech in German, French and English. In 1919 she addressed the meeting of the International League for Peace and Freedom in Zurich, and in 1937 she represented African-American Women at the World Fellowship of Faiths in London.First appointed to the District of Columbia School Board in 1895, she served until 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911. During World War I, Terrell worked for the War Risk Insurance Bureau and became involved in a protest about the treatment of African-American women. After the armistice, she worked with the War Camp Community Service as director of work among African-American girls and women. In these jobs Terrell encountered continued resistance by white people to equal treatment for African-Americans; this infuriated her, since so many black soldiers had died fighting for ╥democracy╙ abroad. In 1920 the Republican National Committee hired her to supervise women╒s work in the East, educating women about the right to vote and encouraging their participation in the Republican Party. In 1929 she campaigned for Ruth Hannah McCormick in her unsuccessful bid to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Toward the end of her life, particularly after her husband╒s death in 1925, Terrell became increasingly militant in both her politics and her political strategy; she joined picket lines and advocated direct action to challenge discriminatory laws and practices. In 1949, she sued after being refused readmission to the Washington branch of the American Association of University Women; although most members of the local chapter resigned in protest, Terrell was admitted by the national body. In 1949 she was elected chair of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination laws, a small interracial group targeting restaurants that refused to serve African-Americans. In 1950 they brought suit against Thompson Restaurant, which had refused them service; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in 1953, holding that segregated eating facilities in Washington were unconstitutional. Terrell also joined the campaign to free Rosa Ingram, a sharecropper sentenced to death after killing a white man in self-defense. (Ingram was finally freed in 1959.) A 1940 autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, followed a lifetime in which she published articles and stories on topics ranging from lynching to sharecropping, from disfranchisement to racial passing. Terrell lived to celebrate the 1954 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, but died two months later on July 29, 1954. She received honorary doctorates from Howard, Wilberforce and Oberlin Colleges, plus many awards from the groups and associations with which she was involved. 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