Ballot Blocked Episode 2 - The Transnational Activism of Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell

Library of Congress

This episode explores the transnational organizing of African American women at the turn of the 20th century. A key figure in this movement was Mary Church Terrell. An educator, writer, civil rights advocate, and suffragist, Terrell worked to advance the causes of racial justice and gender equality in the United States and around the globe. Her incredible life and work demonstrate the possibilities and the limits of transnational feminism in the decades before and after ratification of the 19th Amendment.

To learn more about Mary Church Terrell, we interviewed Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks. She is a professor of history at Victor Valley College in California. Dr. Callahan Banks’s groundbreaking research draws on Terrell’s German language diaries, along with other German language sources, to understand Terrell’s influence on feminist organizing on both sides of the Atlantic. Her scholarship also reveals the important connections that developed between Black women’s clubs in the U.S. and women’s organizations abroad.

• Ballot Blocked Episode 2: The Transnational Activism of Mary Church Terrell

  
  

  In this episode, we explore the transnational activism of African American women at the turn of the 20th century. A key figure in this movement was Mary Church Terrell. An educator, writer, civil rights advocate, and suffragist, Terrell worked to advance the causes of racial justice and gender equality in the United States and across the globe. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks discusses Terrell's lasting influence on feminist organizing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Credit / Author:

  Eleanor Mahoney

  Date created:

  07/14/2021

  Audio Transcript

  Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws have to be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we explore the transnational activism of African American women at the turn of the 20th century. A key figure in this movement was Mary Church Terrell. An educator, writer, civil rights advocate, and suffragist, Terrell worked to advance the causes of racial justice and gender equality. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women or NACW in 1896 and served as the group’s first president. Terrell was a brilliant linguist and could speak multiple languages. In the 1880s, while in her twenties, she studied abroad in Europe. These travels introduced Terrell to the world of transnational feminist organizing. Over the next three decades, she would cross the Atlantic many times, giving lectures, attending conferences, and publishing in foreign newspapers and journals. She used all these venues to call attention to the rich history and contemporary lives of Black women in the United States and around the world. To learn more about the international activism of Mary Church Terrell, I spoke with Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks. She is a professor of history at Victor Valley College in California. Dr. Callahan Banks’s groundbreaking research draws on Terrell’s German language diaries, along with other German language sources, to understand Terrell’s influence on feminist organizing around the world. Her scholarship also reveals the important connections that developed between Black women’s clubs in the U.S. and women’s organizations abroad. What propelled Mary Church Terrell into a life of organizing and advocacy? Dr. Callahan Banks explains. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: Terrell is best remembered today for her career in the U.S. as an early civil rights activist, as an educator, as a lecturer on rights for women and African Americans, as the daughter of the wealthiest black family in the South, the Churches at the time. But, recent research, including my own, on her international activism, I think really expands our knowledge or our understanding of who she was as a public figure. It's almost no surprise that Terrell became active in social movements during her time because she was born in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. Her contemporaries included Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Murray Washington. So, this really made her a part of this pioneering generation of African American women who earned college degrees, who sought professional careers, challenged black male leadership on the basis of gender discrimination, and who became their own ... a political force in their own right with the establishment of Black women's clubs. Terrell graduated from Oberlin College. Against her father's wishes, she pursued a career as an educator. In her early 20s, she managed to convince him to fund her self-guided study abroad expedition around Europe for two years. She then returned with this resolve to fight for racial justice. Not too long after her return home, she married Robert H. Terrell, who was an accomplished young man and was a graduate of Harvard and Howard University. They married in a very lavish ceremony at her father's home. In her autobiography, Terrell points to two traumatic experiences that motivated her to become a full-time activist, one of them being the murder of her childhood friend, Thomas Moss, who was a successful grocery store owner in Memphis, Tennessee, and who was viewed as a threat by white businessmen who wanted to control the economy and the wealth building within black communities in the South. And the second being equally, or even more tragic, was the miscarriage of her three babies, which she blamed on inferior Jim Crow facilities. These two very personal tragedies are examples of the kinds of racial injustices experienced by African Americans from all socioeconomic backgrounds, but they were the main two motivating factors for real that really pushed her into public life. Eleanor Mahoney: These traumas propelled Terrell into becoming one of the most important civil rights activists of her era. She was a leader in the Black women’s club movement and worked to unify local organizations into a national force for political and social change. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: Black women's clubs were independent black women's organizations that came about in the 1890s and were established across the country. They focused on advancing the race and gender equality. Black women's clubs were intellectual communities, really. They debated about the best strategies for dismantling Jim Crow and ensuring Black women made progress along with civil rights gains for the larger Black community. In the early years of the Black women's club movement, Black women focused on bringing social services to poor Black neighborhoods. They established kindergartens, medical clinics, nursing schools, etc. With the founding of the first African American women's national organization, which was the National Association of Color Women, also known as the NACW, in 1896, and Mary Church Terrell as the organization's first president, we began to see Black women's clubs expand its role into the public sphere through political agitation. And so Black club women challenged discriminatory state laws that undermined their rights as U.S. citizens, so, for example, petitioning against Jim Crow, streetcar laws, and the exploitation of Black prisoners by the convict lease system. Of course, many of these same Black club women had been active in the suffrage movement, or at least to the extent they were allowed. Even for women like Terrell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Fannie Barrier Williams, these women were all very fair-skinned, and so from time to time they were invited to attend conferences put on by the National American Women's Suffrage Association. But by and large, Black women were really kept out of playing a more, taking on more prominent roles and being more visible within these organizations, in part because they were not yet a national organization until 1896, so they didn't have that standing, but it was also due to racial discrimination. So, one motivating factor for Black women in establishing their own clubs was due to race prejudice from predominantly white women's organizations, on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, sexism from predominantly Black men's organizations. And so, Black women understood that only they could best represent and advance an agenda that would benefit them. So with the formation of the NACW, Black women really became their own political force. They injected their voice in these largely white women’s suffrage organizations, and they really pushed leaders, like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Emily Greene Balch to publicly include racial justice as part of their platform. Because for Black women, putting in racism and sexism were intertwined. They could not separate the two. Eleanor Mahoney: During this period, American suffragists were forming ties with other feminists in Europe, creating a transnational women’s movement. Terrell became a leading figure in this exchange, urging the largely white women’s suffrage movement to address racial justice as well as gender inequity. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: African American women used the international arena to make advancements towards gender equality and to dismantle white supremacy in a variety of ways. They attended international women's conferences, often as uninvited guests, as was the case with Hallie Quinn Brown who showed up at the International Council of Women's Conference in London in 1899 and gave an impromptu 30-minute speech on the racial indignities imposed on blacks by white Americans. When extended, Black women accepted invitations to give lectures at these international meetings, and they eventually were able to join as official members to organizations like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Black women published essays in international journals. In these essays, they would share their experiences abroad in prominent Black newspapers at the time, such as Voice of the Negro, the Washington Bee, The Chicago Defender where they knew there was a large readership and audience. Terrell exercised all these avenues. Her activist debut, if you will, on the international stage was at the International Council of Women's Congress meeting in Berlin in 1904 where she attended as part of the U.S. women's branch or sometimes they're called councils. She was asked to give a lecture on wage-earning women. She turned that moment into an opportunity to talk about the progress of Black women since emancipation. She used it also as an opportunity to lay blame for the challenges confronting Black women at the feet of white Americans. She gave her lecture in German and in French and received a standing ovation. Terrell went on to share her experiences abroad and at that conference in the Voice of the Negro. And she included photos. A number of Black and white newspapers reported on the event and Terrell's very well-received performance. Terrell published essays in international journals not too long after the meeting in Berlin. Her essays focused on the convict lease system and on white Southerners' propensity for violence against African Americans. She argued in that essay that that could only be stopped by non-Southern whites. As I mentioned earlier, eventually, some Black women were invited to become members of transnational women's organizations, and so that was also true for Mary Church Terrell, who became a member and the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Executive Board for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Eleanor Mahoney: The transnational activism of African American women like Mary Church Terrell advanced the causes of racial and gender equity on both sides of the Atlantic. Historians still have much to learn about the effects of this work. And, as Dr. Callahan Banks explains, any assessment or metric seeking to measure its impact must take into the account the pervasiveness of white supremacy in early 20th century feminist spaces. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: I tread lightly when I answer these kinds of questions that kind of inherently assume that Black women were on the same playing field as white feminists in terms of Black women's access to sites of power and/or access to individuals in positions of power who could make things happen on their behalf. I say that to say that we must always recognize that Black women were claiming agency in a white supremacist world. What often happens when we in the scholarly world ask about their direct impact, what we're really saying is if we cannot draw a straight line from, say, Mary Church Terrell’s or any other African-American feminist transnationalist actions to an outcome in the international field, well, then Black women were not really that effective or it raises doubts in terms about the significance of African-American women's activism abroad. That being said, I do have an example of how Terrell influenced the position of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, also known as WILPF, on an international debate in which race and white womanhood was at the center. Following the end of World War I, an international scandal erupted in Germany regarding the stationing of French African troops in occupied Germany's Rhineland territory. Accusations that basically said Black troops were raping German women and spreading venereal diseases. All this gained traction and became a global debate in which the U.S., Great Britain, and other Western industrialized countries began putting pressure on France to remove the French African troops from Germany. The white European and American women within the transnational feminist organization, WILPF, then circulated a petition with the end goal of sending it to the League of Nations to put their ... as a way of putting their support behind the removal of the troops. So, Mary Church Terrell, of course, was asked to sign the petition mainly because she was the only Black woman sitting on the executive board. And of course it would add legitimacy to WILPF's position, but Terrell refused. It had more to do with race than raping German women. She made it clear to her colleagues that Black women are raped in occupied territories all the time and with impunity and there's no outrage. Terrell encouraged her colleagues to look further into the matter. She was pretty resolute that she thinks there's more to this than black troops just freely having their way with German women. So not too long after that, there ... It became clear in Germany and the international community that these were trumped up charges, that these were politically motivated, and there was really not much to them. That's really an example of how Terrell intervened in an international political affair. When it comes to African American women and our understanding of transnationalism, we have to be more creative. We have to get out of these rigid definitions of transnationalism. If anything, Terrell and her ... Ida B. Wells, and Addie Hunton, and other Black women who were on the international scene at the same time, if anything, they remind us that transnationalism isn't simply cross-border dialogue that causes a direct outcome, but it's really a web of various forms of communication through a diverse set of channels. As I mentioned earlier, African American women were not in positions of authority within these transnational feminist organizations. So as an alternative, Terrell published articles on racial violence against Black Americans in foreign newspapers, which then translated and republished and circulated her work in other countries, and so, we had to get to a place where we also see this as transnationalism. Eleanor Mahoney: Mary Church Terrell and other African American women started their own transnational feminist group in 1920, only a few months after the end of World War I. The organization was to be independent of existing groups that had long been dominated by white women and would put the fight against racism front and center in its actions. As Dr. Callahan Banks explains, the early 1920s was a period of international activism, and, by founding a new organization, African American women seized this unique moment to advance their social and political aims. Dr. Noaquia Callahan Banks: The International Council of Women of the Darker Races, also known as ICWDR, remains a story that really needs to be told. But with such limited sources, scholars have been left with more questions than, honestly, we have answers to. The ICWDR was founded in 1920 by Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Burroughs, Addie Hunton, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Margaret Murray Washington, Mary Church Terrell, and a few others. I mean, all very prominent, heavy-hitter Black club women. In this post-war era, Black women had a clear understanding that the international arena was important, was an important site for them to advocate where they could advocate their own political agenda. They also understood that their agenda will really never be fully realized, embraced if they only worked with or collaborated with a majority white organization like WILPF, like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. So, Black feminists of the ICWDR wanted to place the fight against global racism at the center of their activism in the international sphere. One of the initial aims of the organization was to disseminate knowledge about people of color around the world. They saw this as a way to educate African Americans about the accomplishments of Black people worldwide and also as a way to encourage racial pride. They also formed local study groups to learn about the conditions of women of color outside of the US. They also raised funds to build schools in Liberia and Ethiopia. There were also plans for Black women to take a trip to some of these sites and collaborate with women of color on the ground. But, unfortunately, the ICWDR never really realized its fullest potential. Its membership remained small, roughly only 100 members or so, and most of them were African American women. I believe they only held one official conference. So by the early 1940s, the organization had pretty much phased out of existence. But, to make the connection to WILPF, several of the founders of the ICWDR had been members of WILPF. WILPF was established during World War I, and its goals were to obtain suffrage for all women, to replace militarism with pacifism, and to foster a more cross-culture dialogue. Jane Adams, kind of no surprise, but maybe surprising to some, served as the organization's first president. Initially, Black women were not invited to become members, but Jane Adams and other several ... or and other white progressives really pushed for the recruitment of appropriate Black women, meaning those who had similar backgrounds as themselves, who were high profile political public figures who could meet the financial demands of the organization, so being able to attend meetings, women who did not maybe solely depend on themselves to support themselves financially, but who had husbands that were doing fairly well. Mary Church Terrell, Addie Hunton, and other well-off Black club women were some of the first recruits, I would say, into the organization. But, there were tensions from the beginning. There were white women who left WILPF when they learned that there were Black members. Black women did not hold leadership positions within the national chapters of the organizations. A really good example of how efforts to add a racial justice platform was rejected was at the WILPF conference meeting in Zurich, Switzerland in 1919 where Terrell was invited to give a lecture. When she shared her desire to speak out on the mistreatment of black American troops during the war, and she also advocated to put forth a resolution for WILPF to take a public stand on racial justice, her white American colleagues were not supportive. In fact, long-time suffragist Emily Greene Balch went so far as to go behind Terrell's back and ask the translators to alter Terrell's speech by removing language about race issues in the United States. Terrell was miffed, to put it politely, when she found out. But in the end, Terrell was able to deliver her original lecture in German and French, just like she had in Berlin in 1904 at the International Council of Women's conference because the translator misunderstood Emily Greene Balch's directions and never made the changes. So, Terrell's resolution on race prejudice was accepted and adopted by the organization. I know at one point in the late 1920s there was talk to form an interracial committee, I believe is what they called it, to focus on race issues, but that concept was quickly abandoned as white WILPFers wanted to control that committee and Black WILPFers were not having it. WILPF's black members really suffered over the decades because they did not want to add racial justice onto the platform in a very meaningful way. Just like the black club women, just like they had done decades prior, black feminist transnationalists recognized that they would need to establish an organization by black women for black women, hence the ICWDR. Eleanor Mahoney: The incredible life and work of Mary Church Terrell demonstrates the possibilities and the limits of transnational feminism in the decades before and after ratification of the 19th Amendment. Born in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who had been enslaved, Terrell would go on to become an educator, civil rights activist, lecturer, and writer, published in newspapers and journals around the world. She led the National Association of Colored Women and was a leading advocate for women’s rights in the United States and globally. On both sides of the Atlantic, she spoke out in favor of racial justice and gender equality. She connected the fight for women’s voting rights to the ongoing struggle for African American civil and political rights, during a period of intense racial violence and Jim Crow segregation. Yet, all too often, white women’s organizations, like the National American Women's Suffrage Association and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, attempted to silence Terrell and other Black women. As a result, Black women formed their own local, national, and international groups, creating a vibrant movement that represented their needs and voices. Dr. Callahan Bank’s research demonstrates the significance and reach of this work, revealing the international scope of Black women’s activism at the turn of the 20th century. In the next episode of Ballot Blocked, we’ll go further inside the mainstream suffrage movement and explore the limitations of a leadership that repeatedly sought to exclude women of color.