Meet The Historian! Alison Parker and Unceasing Militant

Annette Chats with the Author of a Biography of Mary Church Terrell, the Most Fascinating Black History/Women's History Star We Knew Nothing About. Until Now.

Born in slavery and raised in wealth, she was a celebrity on the national and world stage, who was nonetheless broke and, after her death, largely forgotten.

Mary Church Terrell’s life sounds like a riddle, because, until now, it has been. If people thought at all of this pioneering mover and shaker in civil rights and women’s rights, it was that she was very posh and proper, and a bit boring for most of her life.

Well, yes, she was posh and proper (I say the same of militant British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, whom composer Dame Ethel Smyth had to teach how to throw a stone through a shop window).

But Mary Church Terrell boring? Absolutely not.

Gobsmacking, more like.

Indeed, she even smacked a racist white man’s gob on a streetcar in Washington, DC.

So, right there, that’s a clue that she’s not:

(UK) what it says on the tin

(US) what you learned in Black History Month

This AND SO MUCH MORE is what I learned reading historian Alison M. Parker’s Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell.

Recently, I was delighted to introduce you to Dr. Parker’s book in a two-part Annette Tells Tales post (link below)

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New Reader Asks: Annette Tells Tales? What’s that?

Annette Tells Tales is one of the six categories of Non-Boring History posts.

In Tales posts, I chattily channel great stories from (usually academic) history. Think lovechild of Reader’s Digest (if it had a British sense of humor), and Mystery Science Theatre, 3000. Only history.

To best enjoy this interview, read my Tales interpretation of Dr. Parker’s book, starting here:

Out of One, Many Marys (Part 1)

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Meeting Mary Church “Mollie” Terrell with Dr. Alison Parker

Today, I invite you to meet Dr Alison Parker herself! I chatted with her a couple of days ago about Mary Church Terrell, and the challenges and rewards of her research.

Prefer reading to watching? I’ve posted a lightly-edited transcript below.

How Long Is This Video? Just under 30 minutes

TRANSCRIPT

Edited for clarity

ANNETTE LAING This is Annette Laing with Non-Boring History on Substack. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Alison M. Parker.

Dr. Parker is chair of the department of history and the Richards professor of American history at the University of Delaware, where she's also co-chair of the University's anti-racism initiative.

Alison is the author of Unceasing Militant, the life of Mary Church Terrell. It was chosen as one of the Best Black History Books of 2020 by the African-American Intellectual History Society.

Welcome, Alison, thank you for joining me. 

ALISON M. PARKER I'm delighted to be here. 

ANNETTE So let's launch right in. Mary Church Terrell, a major figure in civil rights and also in women's rights, who was very well known in her lifetime. Why do you think she's been in the historical shadows for so long?

ALISON I think there are a lot of reasons. There are many really important Black women who have remained in the shadows of history. But the other thing is that she had a very respectable demeanor and presentation.

She was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which was an organization that actually had a quite progressive and sometimes even radical agenda, in terms of its anti-racism and pro-suffrage positions, and anti-segregation positions for things like streetcars, and everything else.

It also was an organization where she created the slogan of Lifting While We Climb, and that was taken to mean that she was one-dimensional and elitist, not of the people.

And this is where I think there was a misunderstanding. She's been dismissed as somebody who was not representative of Black women at the time.

ANNETTE And yet, one of the things I found very interesting in the book was that you made it very clear that the rank and file of the National Association of Colored Women regarded her as someone they wanted to speak for them. So where did this go wrong? Why did people start to pigeonhole her as an elitist?

ALISON When I first started writing about her, it was for a different book I was working on, on black and white women's political thought in the 19th century, and I picked her as one of the black women who I was going to examine.

Of course, I was reading biographies of all the women, because I wanted to know a little bit about who they were before I started talking about their political thought. 

However, when I looked  for a biography of Mary Church Terrell, all I could find was her autobiography.

I also found a lot of books [about her] for children and for teenagers. I was surprised by that, because I was surprised that somebody who was one of the only two black women who helped co-found the NAACP, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, it was really unclear why she wouldn't have had a biography.

When I read the biographies for children, I saw that they all had a typical trajectory, and the trajectory was to say she was conservative as a young adult, and then, when she was very old-- so they skip from when she was in her 30s to when she was in her 80s and early 90s-- they say, then she became radicalized in her old age, and that's when she took direct action against segregation. 

And it's a nice story, because it implies that you're not going to do those kind of things if you have anything to worry about, any stake in society at an earlier moment, and that it's only when you're just about to die, you know [laughter] when it's all over, that you can take that radical action.

This just didn't seem to ring true. Even before I had done a huge amount of work on her, that just didn't seem like a likely scenario. 

And that's what made me want to look at her more carefully,  to see what was really up with her story, since she had been given this one particular narrative arc, over and over and over again, in these children's biographies.

ANNETTE It's such an interesting thought. I'd never read any of the children's books about her, but I present in  schools,  and I put together what I call one of my college lectures for kids, in this case middle schoolers and fifth graders. I talk about Mary Church Terrell based on my recollection of what I read of her autobiography, I think.

And you get the impression from that [autobiography], and just from [material] online, that in 1913, at the women's march at the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, that black women were completely sidelined, and that [organizer] Alice Paul tried to tell them don't come [to the march].

Mary Church Terrell, I imagined saying, oh, we're coming, but then agreeing to segregation.

So I'm wondering how much Terrell,  in some ways, may have crafted this narrative, inadvertently, herself,

ALISON Perhaps to some degree, in the sense that the autobiography obviously leaves out key things, and is more like an extended curriculum vita. You know, it's like an attempt just to show the accomplishments of a black woman, who was born enslaved. So really, that was a key goal for her. 

She was born enslaved, in Memphis, Tennessee, during the Civil War, as was Ida B. Wells-Barnett the same year. So they both come from this situation of enslavement, with their parents having been enslaved as well.

That informed her understanding of how she needed to navigate in a predominantly white world. Her book was called A Colored Woman in a White World. Another title she had thought at one point was A Rocky Road.

One of the things I think she was trying to do, was to say "I speak five languages, I taught Latin in high school and college." So there's a lot of that, and it's not necessarily done out of egotism.

She was writing speeches, and the ones that black women in the audiences loved were talks about the progress of colored women, is what she called it, right? 

So it's this notion of where we have come, given where we started. So that was a lot of what I think she was thinking about in that autobiography. 

But I wanted to get back to the point you mentioned about the parade, because that was something really interesting.

[Terrell] was inspired by the suffragettes across the ocean. She really liked the Pankhursts. She had visited England, and had actually seen Emmeline Pankhurst give a talk in Washington, DC. She was really excited to think about the possibilities of direct action for suffrage in the United States.

And that's one of the arguments that I'm trying to say:  Look, she was doing these kinds of protests, direct action protests, far before 1954, the year she passed away. This was not something new to her. The parade is one of those examples of a direct action that she was involved in.

It is true that Alice Paul tried to segregate black women,  and have them be at the back of the parade. She claimed that wasn't because of her own interests, but because she was trying to bring in white, Southern suffragists.

Either way, it was a racist act that was highly problematic, and [it's] the story we know.

And if we know anything about this story of black women in the suffrage movement, it's a story of Ida B. Wells-Barnett defiantly inserting herself into the Illinois contingent of the parade, and marching with the white women.

That is 100% true. But it is usually told as an act of solitary defiance.

What I decided to do, after I'd been working on the biography for quite a while, was to look into what really happened, because this was another point that kept not ringing true for me: The idea that Mary Church Terrell would have agreed to march at the very back in a segregated unit just didn't make any sense, given her personality. If she had done it, she would have complained about it for the rest of her life. [laughter]

I just saw absolutely no evidence of that, and that's what motivated me to take the time, when I was pretty far along in the process of writing her biography, to go back to that moment and really try to understand what happened. 

That's when I found out that dozens and dozens of Black women marched all throughout the parade, according to their professions. It was divided up so teachers would walk together, the college students, [etc].

And of course, [Terrell] negotiated with Alice Paul and [white lawyer and suffragist] Inez Mulholland,  who was a lawyer and activist who rode at the front of the parade on a white horse, symbolizing, basically, white New Womanhood. But [Mulholland] was more progressive,  and together [Terrell and Mulholland] convinced Alice Paul that she had to let Howard University's new Delta Sigma Theta sorority march together in the parade with the other college women. 

[Terrell] and the National Association of Colored Women marched with the New York State delegation.

Now, technically, that was in the back, because all of the states were organized to be in the back.

So even Ida B. Wells was in the back, according to that logic.

But it doesn't mean she was. None of them were segregated in the back. 

That was a big moment for me, to realize just how much the stereotypes that we have make it hard for us to see what really happened. 

ANNETTE And it comes down to the evidence. I mean, we're beyond living memory for all of these [events]. We can't ask anybody who was there.

That story alone, Alison, was worth the price of the book. It's wonderful.

Mary Church Terrell,  a lot of her significance, as she recognized, was to lay the groundwork for more change,  and it's a sort of institutional groundwork, involving herself not only in starting the NACW,  but she also was one of the founders of the NAACP. And as you know, many, many more.

The problem with club work, of course, is  that it's not terribly sexy. You nonetheless show that it's not just about that, that even on the most personal level, [Terrell] got involved in protests.

What kinds of challenges did you find in recovering evidence for what happened to her, and what kinds of sources particularly helped you in that?

ALISON Well, you know, it's an interesting situation with Mary Church Terrell's biography. She actually had a humongous number of sources available for me to use.

It's the opposite of what you would find for some women, or anybody.

And that's because, as a Black woman who was so aware of the fact that other Black women were never honored and recognized in history, she made a point of doing things, like she created a pageant that was performed in the Washington DC School District that was about Phillis Wheatley, the poet.

She was always trying to tell about Black foremothers and the history of Black women. And she also wanted her own history told, and she didn't want to be just relying on her autobiography to do that. 

So she saved all of her papers, and then she went to the one Black librarian who worked at the Library of Congress, and she got a meeting with him, and she said, "I want the Library of Congress to take my papers.”

That takes a lot of foresight, and a lot of sense of "I have meaning in my life, and somebody needs to tell it."

So she donated a very large amount of papers to the Library of Congress.

And then, after her death, her daughter, who was named Phyllis after [18th century Black poet] Phillis Wheatley, gave more papers to Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn collection. Her family, the Church family in Memphis, [also] has papers at the University of Memphis. 

So it was actually almost like there was too much, and it's interesting, because now it's all digitized, and even a lot of it is transcribed. That was certainly not the case when I was working on any of it. So there's a lot more to be done, now that the material is so accessible.

One time I thought to myself, maybe somebody didn't write her full-length biography because there was too much material. It's overwhelming. So it's the opposite of looking for that tiny scrap of evidence. And then, you know, newspapers.

What I'm working on now is a different project where I have no papers whatsoever, so I think that's interesting. So you can go to either extreme, right? 

ANNETTE Well, I'm an early Americanist, so welcome to our world! [Laughter]  Making too much out of very, very little!

How did learning more about Mary Church Terrell's family background influence how you saw her? That's something you talked a lot about in the book.

ALISON Yeah, that's another chapter that I did toward the end, and that was the chapter on the history of her family's enslavement, and her ancestors. Of course, it's harder to write in terms of getting the material and finding the evidence, and then it's harder to write, because it's a brutal history .

One of the things that Mary Church Terrell always talked about was the fact that she wanted to call the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, when the women were creating their group, to call it Colored Women, rather than Afro or Afro-American or Negro, which would have been the words of the time that were used, as well as colored. 

But she said that colored better represented what had happened to African women since they had been in America. She was pointing specifically to the fact that her light skin doesn't reflect her African heritage, but the fact that her enslaved grandmothers had been raped by their white enslavers. 

This is something she talked about, not only to Black women, but also to the white audiences that she got access to, partially through her lighter skin color, or elite status and education at Oberlin College. These are things that allowed her to bring up these very uncomfortable topics in those kinds of spaces.

But her background made a difference to her, because this is where the argument that she was an elitist who had no understanding of the common person, you know, the average Black woman, just doesn't make any sense.

Her own grandmothers' stories of enslavement made her cry as a child. 

And she knew the price that her parents had paid, even though they were so-called privileged during their time as enslaved people because they worked for their white fathers, usually in either home or business environment as opposed to in the fields. 

In some ways they might have been safer, but obviously rape was a huge danger for women who worked inside the homes of white enslavers. 

On top of that, the emotional distress of her mother, who had to basically be the servant for her half-sister, right?

So it's a very complicated story. 

Really, what it shows is that when [Terrell] was thinking about these issues, she was always thinking about what it meant for all black women to not have proper child care. Not to have proper healthcare. Not to have all of these things. 

And then, like Serena Williams today, being an elite black woman didn't mean that you would get proper healthcare when you were pregnant.

[Terrell] herself experienced a late-term miscarriage, a stillbirth, and  then a baby who was born and survived only two days because he was placed in an improvised incubator in a segregated Washington, DC hospital. 

Her elite status did not translate into different and special treatment for her. So when she would go argue that black women had to become nurses, so that they would better treat and care for their Black patients, she was speaking from personal experience, and from the trauma of losing three babies in a row.

ANNETTE She had such a surprising background for a lot of my readers. That she was born into slavery, but not raised in it. That her parents became free, she became free, her parents were successful early in her life and yet, light skinned though she was, it didn't help her much in the climate of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. That things were taking a step back. Her taking her daughters to Oberlin College, determined to enroll them in this mostly white college, [and] finding that things had changed [for the worse since she graduated]. And you show how she fights [the worsening racism and segregation].

What strikes me, too, is that she was absolutely committed to integration. I think one misunderstanding that many folks have is that Black organizations, Black colleges, didn't start as a deliberate attempt to separate people. They started because there was no choice.

Mollie Terrell was among the few who was able to enroll in a predominantly white college, Did her commitment to integration remain consistent throughout her life as a final goal? 

ALISON Yes. Because I think she saw segregation, legal segregation, and even informal de facto segregation, as being a kind of a harm and a humiliation.

So for her, it was only through proximity, and through a kind of status of equality, in terms of where can you sit, where can you shop, those kinds of things. In the 1930s, she participated in the picketing of stores, where black people were able to buy products, but were not able to work in the stores.

So that's before the sit-ins, it's decades before, in fact, that kind of activism, but she was participating in earlier versions. So I definitely characterize her as part of this long Civil Rights Movement who's working on these issues over time,

ANNETTE Working with the public, I run into a lot of white people who are rushing now to read books about race. And they're often turning to heavily theoretical books, written for the public. How might reading history, reading Unceasing Militant, help them better understand the questions that they have?

ALISON I think it's helpful to see a Black woman, her personal life struggles, but also her political struggles, and also all of the negotiations and harms and joys that she had over the course of her life that related to the kinds of attitudes and prejudices and laws and white supremacist violence, and everything else that was going on at the time. And to be able to see how it affected a person from the beginning of her life as an enslaved baby, until she died in 1954, the same year that Brown v Board was decided. 

I mean, it's an amazing way to get a large chunk, almost a hundred years,  of American history.  To do it through a life story gives you the understanding of what it meant to be an intersectional Black feminist, from a personal perspective of looking through her life and her words. 

One of the things that she always said -- she talked about intersectionality,  without using that theoretical word, right? -- is that, as a black woman, she was experiencing life through the lenses and through the oppression of sexism and racism. So she was always talking about these kinds of things.

So we get a sense of what it means to be living in an intersectional body,  in a world where that's always something that you have to confront. It explains, also, the kinds of things that were her priority in terms of her activism as well. 

ANNETTE  If you can show through stories, and you do,  what this means, without the social science jargon that unfortunately has unfortunately filtered into history ( ahem, that's my prejudice), it forces the reader, compels the reader, invites the reader to look at the world through the lens of a 19th and 20th century Black woman.

For a lot of my readers, I think that's going to have much more meaningful impact than, unfortunately, some of the books that they're reading that I keep criticizing.

I do want to ask about Robert Terrell, Berto, her husband. Obviously, they had a very close partnership, and you bring that out, which is wonderful.

I was [also] really struck by your acknowledgements and what brought you personally to this project, because in the end as you know, it's always personal.

ALISON So, I feel like those are two different questions--

ANNETTE They are!

ALISON I can take them one at a  time. So Berto, her husband, Robert H. Terrell, was born enslaved, and then managed to move to Washington, DC, and get himself educated to the point where he was working in Massachusetts, and went to Andover, and then to Harvard University, where he got a degree and graduated with honors. So this was a pretty big deal at the time. 

ANNETTE Phillips Andover is like Eton in America. Most Americans, I find, are entirely unaware of its existence. It's a very elite boarding school. 

ALISON Absolutely. So he was exceptional at the time in all kinds of ways.

[Everyone had told [Mary], now that you learned all these foreign languages, and now that you know Latin and Greek, you'll never find a husband.

But [Berto] wasn't the slightest bit worried about all of her accomplishments, because he was equally accomplished, and a supporter of [women's] suffrage and everything else.

One of the points that I would like to say, is that there were even more letters and materials about her that I didn't know about, that were at her family's house in Highland Beach, Maryland. [This] was a Black beach resort that Frederick Douglass's, son, Charles, had set up, and [the Terrells] had purchased land right next to the house that was being built for Frederick Douglass, right before he died. 

The amazing thing is that I was able to go to the family's house, and they shared those documents with me. I was able to read the love letters between Mary Church Terrell, and her husband, which they had  not donated to any of the libraries that have repositories.

After reading them,  and talking with [the family], and working with them for a while, the family and I decided to have me approach Oberlin College about the possibility of having the papers that they had not yet donated somewhere be given to Oberlin. 

Oberlin did have a symposium where they brought the family, me, and some other scholars too, come and speak about Mary Church Terrell.

Then, a few years later, there was another big event where the family gave them more papers, and [there] was a rededication of the library as the Mary Church Terrell Library. This was also part of Carmen Twillie Ambar's inauguration as the first Black female president of Oberlin College. 

So it was a very meaningful experience, and that was another side of what to me ended up being a very personal part of it,  because I became close with the Terrell family. 

But then, in terms of my own family background, my own history, my mother was a women's studies teacher who ended up bringing all kinds of amazing Black women to this private girls school that she worked at in Los Angeles, where she brought in Shirley Chisholm,  Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

And she had been guided by her interest and participation in the Civil Rights movement when she was teaching at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. 

So these are all things that play a big role in my interest in these topics, and in having inspiration of my own.

ANNETTE Alison Parker, thank you so much for taking the time, and, as ever there's so much else to ask.

Thank you for joining us at Non-Boring History. 

ALISON PARKER Thank you very much.

If you’re as fascinated by Mary Church Terrell as I am, thanks to this book, you can pick up your very own copy of Unceasing Militant from your library, by order from your Indie bookstore, or on sale at ye dreaded Amazon, where it’s a steal at under $9 during Women’s History Month.

Questions or comments about Mary Church Terrell and Unceasing Militant? Drop them here!

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