 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book talk with Allison M. Parker, author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell. This is our last program for 2020. I encourage you to regularly check our calendar on archives.gov as we continue our schedule of virtual programming in 2021. In the meantime, you can revisit our past programs on our YouTube channel. Last August, the National Archives, along with the nation, observed the Centennial of the 19th Amendment, a milestone in women's voting rights. For more than a year leading up to this anniversary, we explored the story of women's suffrage through exhibits, social media campaigns, articles, education programs, and more. Our Cornerstone exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women in the Vote, tells the story of women's struggle for voting rights as a critical step toward equal citizenship. The activism of thousands of women of diverse backgrounds was essential in the fight to ultimately pass the 19th Amendment. The exhibit looked beyond the familiar names to explore how American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, and class advanced the cause of suffrage and follows the struggle for voting rights beyond 1920. Mary Church Terrell, a notable black leader in the suffrage movement and founding member of the National Association of Colored Women, was one of the women featured during our observance of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment. In the first part of the 20th century, Terrell worked tirelessly, not just for women's voting rights, but for civil rights for all persons. And I look forward to hearing about Terrell's story from today's guest author, Allison Parker. Joining Allison Parker in conversation today is Nikki Brown, who is an associate professor of history and of American and Africana studies. She works on African American history and visual culture of the 20th century, as well as race and representation, global feminism, and gender studies. Brown has written several articles on African American women's politics in the progressive era and the impact of racial segregation laws on contemporary American politics. Her book, Private Politics and Public Voices, African American Women's Politics from World War I to the New Deal, explores the attempts made by African American women to shape public policy between 1915 and 1920. Allison M. Parker is history department chair and Richards professor of American history at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests at the intersections of gender, race, disability, citizenship, and the law in United States history. And was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. In addition to unceasing militant, Parker is the author of Articulating Rights, 19th Century American Women on Race Reform and the State, and Purifying America Women, Cultural Reform and Procensorship Activism, 1873 to 1933. Parker serves as the founding editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press. Now let's turn to Allison Parker and Nikki Brown. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome, dear audience, to a discussion between Allison Parker and myself, Nikki Brown, to the National Archives audience on this terrific book that Allison Parker has just written and it has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press. It is this book that I have in my hands and it's this book that's on your screen, Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Trish Terrell. I'm very, very happy to begin this conversation with Allison Parker, who is the chair of the Department of History at the University of Delaware. And she's also the Richards professor of American history. Dr. Parker has written three books. Purifying America was her first book, Articulating Rights, Women and Political Thought in the 19th Century is her second book. And the third book that she's here to talk to us about is Unceasing Militant and we're going to have a conversation about Mary Church Terrell. So handing it over to you, Dr. Parker. Allison, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Nikki. And thank you so much for being here to have this conversation together. I really appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to talking with you about it today. Oh, that's terrific. So thank you so much. So what we're going to do just now is just show a few images of Mary Church Terrell and then I'm going to stop the screen share and we're going to have a larger discussion. So this is one of the more famous photographs of Mary Church Terrell. Here is the original photograph and look at this very intricate dress that she's wearing and this fantastic hat that really says a lot about the person that we're going to talk about. Here is another famous image of Terrell with, I think she might be wearing the same dress, but when you get a good look at it, it's really quite amazing. And this is also an image of Terrell that people might be familiar with. So what I'm going to do now is stop the share and we're now going to have a conversation about this remarkable woman. So we're going to talk about a bunch of things in the next 60 minutes, questions ranging from Terrell's early life to how she juggled her activism, her education, and her private life of her family in marriage. How she talked about a meaningful life, how she constructed, rather, a life of meaning for herself. And then we're going to move on to concluding thoughts. She's a remarkable woman, so let's start and start with this question. And that is, first of all, Allison, when was she born? And my follow-up question is, what major events framed her life? Thanks, thanks, Nikki. Yeah, and I think just to start out with, I think what we mostly know about her is that in 1896 she became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. And then in the early 1900s she was a co-founder of the NAACP. And so that places her at the turn of the century for most of what people know. And what's remarkable about her is that she lived for over 90 years and was born in 1863 in Memphis right during the Civil War. But because both of her parents were in one of those liminal positions, they were enslaved, but they were enslaved to the men who were their white fathers. And thus they had some privilege within the institution of slavery to a limited extent that they got some training, some skills that set them up for the reconstruction period. They were still enslaved during the war because Memphis, even after there was a battle of Memphis, and in 1862 the Union took over. And anybody in Tennessee who basically claimed to be a loyalist to the Union could keep their slaves. And so both of Mary Church Terrell's parents' owners did that. So they did not gain their freedom until the end of the Civil War. So she was born into slavery herself, but of course did not actually get raised as an enslaved person, fortunately. So that was a very pivotal aspect of her early years. But then because of their connections to white men and money, her parents were able to start their own businesses early on. Her mother was actually the first primary breadwinner because she ended up starting a hair store which sold hair extensions and wigs to wealthy white women. And so it was a shop that was designed for the, you know, the hairstyles of the day that were quite elaborate. And so that's what she did. And then her husband, Robert Church, tried to set up a saloon in 1866 and found that he was arbitrarily denied a license purely on the basis of his race. He sued based on the brand new Civil Rights Act of 1866. And he won in court. And this actually was dangerous in Memphis at the time. So just a few weeks later, there was a major riot called the Memphis massacre, where white mostly Irish police officers attacked free blacks and freed African Americans, and especially of course targeted their property, and a lot of businesses were destroyed But for Mary Church and her family, it was particularly traumatic experience because her father was shot in the back of the head. And he did not die. But she always said she could put her finger in and feel the depth of the bullet that went into the hole that was left from the bullet that went into his head. So he suffered from migraine headaches from that point forward, and pain, of course, and he developed a terrible temper. And so in that context, it really broke apart their family eventually. They survived as a family unit into the 1870s, but it just was too much for the family to bear in the long run. So that really framed her experience. She knew racial violence and the power of white supremacy from a very early age. I'm going to share the screen for just a second, because you have included in your book an image of her two parents, her parents, her father's, what was her father's name? It's Robert Church and Louisa Ayers Church are her parents. And, you know, one of the points that she always tried to make when people were talking about the history of enslavement and racism and segregation was to kind of point out the hypocrisy of segregation laws and of the hostility of whites towards blacks because she said, you know, look at my parents and she always wanted to be called colored. She didn't want to be called African American or Negro, which were some of the terms that were floating around at the time. But her point was colored actually shows up some of the realities of what it was like to be a slave and she basically pointed to the rape of her grandmothers and their experience with saying, look, our, you know, our skin is so fair for a reason. And you need to acknowledge that this was because of sexual violence against enslaved black women. And so she insisted on the term colored, which ended up being why the National Association of colored women's, you know, it was called the colored women's association for that very reason. Oh, I'm going to stop the share now and that that was a terrific answer that leads just to more questions. I mean, this really shows how much how expert you are in this in this particular topic. And I'm not just sort of throwing out compliments. I mean, what you've just said, and how our parents had businesses and and work to have agency over their lives, particularly having survived slavery and they wanted. And they tried very hard as you write in your book to shield her their daughter from the from the worst of the experience of enslavement. That really brings us to our second discussion and that is that young Molly as she was called is grows and she she she as you write she's a very she's a precocious girl, very smart. And she eventually attends Oberlin College. And my question to you is, how did she, how did they come to select Oberlin College. And what was her life like at Oberlin. Well, with her parents separation in the period of reconstruction. When she was a young girl, and with the situation with so such a terrible education system for freed blacks and free blacks in the south. And I feel that she could get the education that she needed and deserved and that they could afford to pay for. And so they sent her north, and she lived in first near Antioch and went to kind of a model school that was associated with Antioch College, and then later went to Oberlin public schools Preparatory school to get into Oberlin College. And she did want to go there partially, because it was one of the only places that a black woman could attend that was a predominantly white college. One of the things that her parents believed in is that it was very important for her to be able to survive and work within a predominantly white institution because they were living in a predominantly white society. And basically they felt that that would be incredibly important for her. And Oberlin had become a kind of haven for abolitionists in the 1830s and was the first one of the earliest schools to allow and accept for admission both African American men, and then a few years later women. And so she graduated from Oberlin in 1884. And it was, you know, still a time when very few black women were getting that kind of an education so she was absolutely, you know, one of the elites. And one of the, you know, interesting things about it is that she basically asked her father, can I go to school and get a bachelor's degree, because that was not expected for women at the time not black or white, they got what we might call an 18th degree, but what was called the ladies degree at the time, that just enough education to be polished you know you don't need to go too far because what would you do with it right so and the one thing you could do is be a teacher. So she said I want to do the gentleman's course which would be the full four years, and he agreed to pay for that. And so she had a wonderful experience when she was there. She felt that she managed to make some serious and long time friendships with black women and white women, who she met there. And so she was friends with Ida Gibbs who became Ida Gibbs hunt, who was a black woman and a fellow activist for many years. For, I mean for all of their lives and then also with some white women who she met there. So it was a very important experience for her. Wow. But how was she able to convince her father to help to fund her education when it sounds to me her father thought that if if he granted his daughter too much education. He wouldn't be able to marry about he wouldn't be able to marry her off, meaning that that a woman with too much education was not was not considered to be good marriage material how did she convince him. Well, you know it's an interesting situation her her even her female friends at Oberlin said why are you doing the gentleman's course you'll be unmarriageable. And she just said I love learning too much, you know I don't care. And that she basically said the same thing to her father and he did indulge her in that. But when she came back after she graduated. He did not want her to take a teaching job. And his argument was twofold. On the one hand he said well you'll be taking a job away from another black woman who really needs the money and you don't. And that's, you know, a debatable point, especially if she was going to go into university teaching because there weren't actually very many black women to compete with so. So there's that. But then his real issue is, and he told her he said the way to be a lady, and to prove, in a sense for him, his own patriarchal authority would be to have her as a lady of leisure, who stayed in his elegant home as a feminist until she married and then became a lady of leisure in her home as a married woman. So that was the expectation that he had. So when she got a job teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio, as a professor she had to do it against his wishes. And he actually said he would not talk to her ever again. And he, he kept his word for an entire year, and she sent him presents and letters and tried to get back on his good side. But it was a real struggle. And eventually when she finished the year of teaching she telegrammed him and said I'm coming home and I hope you meet me at the train. And he did. So that was their reconciliation and they and from that point forward he supported her work as a teacher and then as a lecturer and a civil rights activist. So it was it just was hard for him at the beginning to make that transition. But from that point on he supported her. I can't, I want to jump right into her life as a, as a lecturer and a writer, but I just can't let this go, because her father sends her to Europe after she graduates as a kind of a finishing school. And she has all of these different experiences. She becomes fluent in French and Italian and German. And she's she is the several men proposed to marry her and one of them was quite serious. Can, can, can you expand a little bit on her time in Europe. Yeah, I mean, it's really very interesting. First, so I need to say that after she taught it will before she got an offer to come to Washington DC and teach at the most prestigious public school in DC for African Americans which was called the M street public high school at the time is what it was called. And she decided that this would be a wonderful opportunity for her so she went there and started teaching Greek and Latin it and the person who was chair of the classics department was Robert H. Michael, who was a very talented young man who had lived the first seven years of his life as an enslaved person, and then ended up graduating from Harvard University, and was the first one to graduate with honors the first black student to graduate with honors. So, in fact they were quite well matched. And he was smitten with her right away. She was quite attracted to him but she wasn't ready to settle down, and she was absolutely determined to have her European tour. And so her father had promised her two years abroad. And so she ended up staying away about two and a half years. But in the meantime, she and Robert terrible writing to each other, the whole time and Jennifer Wilkes has done a fabulous job of both trans translating and then editing her French diaries and so I was able to use those to talk about her time there. But when she was there she met a lawyer who was a young German Baron Von Diebold who ended up asking her to marry him but he did it in a way that actually offended her, which is that he didn't ask her. But at first he directly wrote a letter to her father, and she was horrified because of two things. First she told him afterwards when she found out that in America, this is not how it is done, you have to talk to the woman first, get her approval and then ask her father so she wasn't completely opposed to this traditionalist way, but she felt she should have been asked first. But the biggest issue for her is that she was terrified that her father wouldn't just say no which he knew she knew he wouldn't want her to marry a white man in Europe. But she was more worried that he would force her to come home and she wasn't ready to leave. So she had to kind of pacify her father and promise that she was not interested in staying in Europe and marrying this man. So it was when she returned that she had finally made the decision, as she put it to base herself in the US and to see herself as someone who could use her education to make change for African Americans as a whole. And the way that she and Robert Terrell phrased this was the duty to their race, right? Having been enslaved as in her case a baby and him a child, you know, they knew where they came from. They had all the stories from their family, and they wanted to prove something, right? It's the representing the race. And so they use that terminology, and we're very determined to represent the race in the best possible way. And so that's what they set about to do together. That's, that's just wonderful. In our previous discussions about Mary Church Terrell, one of the things that sticks out to me is how, when you watch, when I watch or used to watch shows like Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs or whatever, they, the writing of these, in these shows, tries, it's almost like it's the way a man would think about what he thinks women think about. It's not really what women think about. And what, what you're saying to me, what I find so striking, what I'm trying to say is that she says that she loves learning so much that she's not going to get married. She's going to put that off till later. She loves, she's not going to Europe to have like a two-year fling or whatever. She loves, she's doing it for the love of the craft, for the love of knowledge. And I, and that narrative is what makes your book so important to me is that when we think about people who love learning in the broad scope of African American history, we think about things like W. E. B. Du Bois or Ralph Ellison, that, that, that, that love of knowledge is often applied to men. But what you're saying is that she loved learning and she was one of many black women, her compatriot, fellow Oberlin College graduate, Anna Julia Cooper. She loved learning too that that love is what drives her, her activism and the, and, and this idea of wanting to be wanting to do the best that they could for the race at the time. So let's, let's, let's jump right in. How did she, well, negotiate motherhood and marriage? Or, or rather, can you describe her relationship with Robert, Robert Church? And did he also subscribe to those same ideas that that women should be ladies of leisure, and then, and then, and then control the household, or, or keep order in the household. Right. No, so the good thing about Robert Terrell, they all have the same first name, but different last names. So Robert Terrell was much more open minded about the role of women he knew from the beginning that she was a brilliant woman and that he encouraged her to write and while she was away and was writing letters to him. He said to her, you know, I think you should be writing for the newspapers. Why don't you explain what you're experiencing and send it home. And he, and she was thrilled that he cared enough to support her on that. And it became even more important after they married that he would encourage her public speaking. He encouraged her to take on these leadership roles in various organizations. And some of his more conservative black friends, this male said, What are you doing, you know, she should be at home and you're violating social norms, you know, this isn't the way it should be working. And he just said, you know, that that's not who we are. And so they really were a couple who made their decisions together. And they were very much in line. Ideologically more so than people think because he's been labeled as being a, you know, a supporter of Booker T Washington because Booker T Washington helped him get some of his appointments once he became a lawyer, and then eventually became a judge. And it is true that it was awkward for him and he always had to kind of balance the fact that, you know, at one point, Washington wrote to him and said, You know, your wife is a problem for me because she's allied herself with people like Ida B Wells and Du Bois and she's founding the NAACP and I'm not really okay with that. And he wrote back and said, You know, there's nothing I can do about that. She's doing good work. And, you know, it's kind of out of my hands. So, so he never dis about her to, you know, obviously, to put it mildly, and instead supported her. But one of the things that was a revelation to me is when I had a conversation at, at a black history meeting, a solo once, and was talking to a colleague and friend, Steven Middleton, who was working on Robert H. Terrell thinking about him as a, as a judge. And I was working on Mary Church Terrell. And he told me that when he had had a conversation with the Langston's who are the Terrell's family members who live in Highland Beach, Maryland, which is a basically it was designed as a private black beach resort in the 1890s by Charles Douglas, Frederick Douglass' son to provide black elites with a place to go when they were being kicked out of the White Beach Resorts in the Annapolis area of Maryland. But he said, Oh, the Langston's have the papers of that are the private love letters of Mary Church Terrell and Robert H. Terrell. And I said, Oh, wow, I really would like to see more about their relationship and about the intimacies that they had together. Because one of the things that I think is really important is to understand how do these private and public lives intersect? And how does it, does it matter to them that that they have this kind of connection with each other? Because it's not just about duty. It's also about eroticism and passion and sex and you know everything else. And so I was very pleased when we both had a chance to go and visit and spend time in Terrell's home with her family. You know, I've been back multiple times since and developed a wonderful relationship with the family and the Langston's have kindly donated her papers, the ones that were remaining to Oberlin College, her alma mater. So that's where they are today. But that there also are papers, of course, that already were at the Library of Congress and at Howard University, but anything that was left in their possession is now at Oberlin. This is an opportunity for me to share my screen and show a picture of Mary Church Terrell and or Mary Church and Robert Terrell. And this is just a photo of with them. He's graduating. Is that that photo? He's in a he's in a cap and gown. Yes. Oh, let's let's show that let's show that very, let's show that image because we can see we can see how handsome he is. Look at look at him and how handsome. I can see the two of them. Let's right there. There we are. There we are. And I also wanted to say just wanted to clarify that you mentioned the work of Jennifer Wilkes, and I wanted to clarify that she is an associate professor of English. And I think African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I know that she's or is that is that right. She's at UT Austin. And she, she, you know, she does really fabulous work and so she's somebody who we both share a passion for learning about Molly Church and then Molly Church Terrell. That's right. That's right. I remember hearing Jennifer, Dr. Wilkes talk about what she found when she translated these diaries and this was years ago. But, but even then, Molly Church was writing. She's, I think I remember this phrase. She said, I must write. I must write. I love writing. Writing is something that brings me such joy, such passion. And, and I, and that's that stayed with me. So I wanted to throw, I wanted to make sure that our audience knows that if you want to know more about the translations of Molly Church's diaries, which she wrote, you explained. She wrote in German or in French or in Italian. If you want to know more about those diaries, please follow up the work of Dr. Jennifer Wilkes at the University of Texas at Austin. Here is, so yes, this is, this is the two of them. Again, Molly Church wearing a terrifically designed, I think it's what's that called a shirt waist or a blouse with a, perhaps with a matching jacket, terrific, terrific. And here's Robert Church. So I'm going to stop the share. And really, really, so now we're in the 1890s. And there's so much going on in terms of African American history. It's often been described, or it was first described this period between 1880 and 1915 as the nadir or the lowest point for African Americans and Rayford Logan, a professor of history at Harvard University, African American historian, described it that that way. And yet when we look at the 1880s and 90s and 1900s and 1910s, we also see a flurry of activity in terms of the founding of different organizations of the NACW, the NAACP. We see the founding of many HBCUs. And at the time, the most important historically black institution is the Tuskegee Institute. So that's where I want to go to now. I want to go to what what there are so many different important pressing urgent matters going on for African Americans between 1880 and 1915. And yet, many of these issues are associated or many of these causes, or these organizations are associated with other activists. And yet, Miley Church tarot is plays a plays a definitive role and I have like a list here. So my question is, what do you think the, which major movement is tarot best associated in your opinion. But I would just also want to give a list like when we talk about anti lynching activism it's Ida B Wells Barnett. We talk about the end of convict leasing it's a Selena Sloan Butler and Rebecca Latimer Felton. We talk about pan africanism we talk we often think about Du Bois and Garvey or the Scottsboro boys, their legal problems, their legal issues in the 1930s we think about the Communist Party. But and yet she played a role in all of these different causes and these movements. So in your opinion, which movement is she best associated with. Well, I think one of the ways to think about it is if we think of her as a civil rights activist or a black freedom struggle advocate, you know it she crosses all those lines. So she really is working on multiple things all of the time she when she's president of the National Association of colored women starting with its founding in 1896. They're talking about segregation and complaining about Jim Crow train cars and things like that. And they are talking about the convict lease system and criticizing that and are concerned about it because they know that it's really limiting the freedom of many African American men but also women and they made a point of saying that. She's writing articles on all these topics. She's writing and giving speeches repeatedly of course for her entire career against lynching. So segregation and lynching are always an issue that she's dealing with. In this case, the protection of women and children and their health and well being is huge for her. The 1890s are very difficult time, because even as these letters between Molly Church, Tarrell and Robert Tarrell show their love for each other. They're passionate joy of being together. It's also an incredibly hard time because like so many black women at the time. It doesn't matter if you're elite or not. She's being affected by the same thing which is a very high problem with miscarriages still burst. One child who lived for the first two days of his life and then died was a highly traumatic period of time. So the 1890s while she's doing all of this work, she's losing baby after baby in ways that were very painful and very public and her commitment to women's health to developing black women as nurses to trying to open up more hospitals. This is personal. This is not about charity work for poor black women. She's seeing this as something that all black women faced. Today, unfortunately, the tragic figures and statistics are similarly horrible for black women in terms of mortality rates and infant deaths and the whole thing. But there's also now scholarship that's really explained that there is a connection between the racism that black women face and what they call weathering. This is a kind of the expression that some scientists use today to describe what it does to a woman's body. To have to constantly be on the defensive, always trying to react or deal with the horrors of the situation that they're living in. Sometimes it can be small microaggressions like people not sitting next to you or moving away. And sometimes it can be learning as she did in 1892 when she was pregnant that one of her closest childhood friends, Thomas Moss and his associates who were business associates and were basically lynched in Memphis, Tennessee for economic competitive reasons. At a time that this is the same exact person who's friends with Ida B. Wells. And so Ida B. Wells' entire career is launched as a anti-lynching activist is launched because of this particular lynching of her friend. But it also deeply informs Mary Church Terrell and she believes that her miscarriage that's a very late term miscarriage is a direct result of having this traumatic news. And of course we don't know this but you know it's a possibility and that's how it fell to her. And so she has to deal with the fact that she believes that this caused this problem. So there's a lot of tragedy in her life and a lot of trauma. And I think that in some ways that's important to recognize and understand because the other thing that we often hear about her is that not only was she an elite which I don't dispute at all. You know, especially if you think about her education, she's more elite than a lot of white people too at her time. So she's absolutely a member of the elite. But what I would dispute is that she's an elitist. And I would say that from the beginning she's very, very concerned with the well-being, you know, in this case of all black women, of all African-Americans in general on the subjects of things like the right to vote. For black women, voting rights was never just about, oh, I want my voting rights because even as they were fighting for the 19th amendment, they knew as well as anybody else that the 14th and 15th amendments weren't being enforced. And that especially in the South, black men were disenfranchised by this whole series of other ways around, you know, the 14th amendment. And they were constantly bringing that up to white women, insisting that that be part of the dialogue and the agenda when it came to suffrage. And they did not always succeed in getting that message through to these women, but they've always succeeded in bringing it up. So they did what they needed to do, but they also set up separate organizations because they knew they couldn't just work in white women's organizations, although they tried to do it whenever they could. Because they knew that they had to have a separate space to force to the top, to the forefront, the kind of priorities that they felt were specific to the African-American community in America. This brings up some really great points. So I'm going to go back to the PowerPoint just for a second to show some images that maybe you can walk us through a little bit. Here is a picture right here of, I think the child that Molly and Robert, oh, Molly and Robert were able to raise to adulthood. And this is Phyllis. That's why she was named after Phyllis Wheatley. You know, her parents were parents who Phyllis's parents were parents who were always thinking about earlier generations of black women, earlier role models, and naming her after an enslaved black poet, you know, makes a lot of sense. And actually, Robert Terrell picked the name because Molly was at that point refusing to pick a name, I think because she was so concerned that the child would not survive. And she just couldn't handle the idea of it. So Robert picked the name instead. But this is Phyllis. She ends up having two children in the sense that she raises her brother, Thomas' daughter, several years after Thomas' wife dies. So she raises her daughter, Mary, named after Mary Church Terrell. So there's lots of Mary's, lots of Roberts, but in any case, so she ends up with two children in the end, but only after six years of trying to conceive one herself. So she was very, very nurturing but also pretty protective of her children once she had them because it had been a difficult time to get to that point. That's right. In this next slide, this brings us right to her activism. This is the image of the National Association of Colored Women, some of the founding mothers of the NACW. And what I just noticed here is that there's a little baby sitting on the lap of... It's interesting. I can't go through every single one of these because it would take too long, but I can point out a few key people. The person holding the baby is not the baby's mother. The person holding the baby is Alice Moore, but it's Alice Dunbar Nelson. But before she has all those names. So that's her. And she's holding Charles Barnett. And right below her on the ground is Ida B Wells, Barnett. And so this is her baby that she's holding. And so it's one of the wonderful early photos of her with her baby there. And then Mary Church Terrell is over on the left with the fancy hat. And there are a number of remarkable other women, you know, within this photo. But actually, if you switch to the next one, I can show you... Oh, yes. Here we are right there. Yeah, in between. Yeah, this one's really wonderful because this is quite a bit later as you can see, Mary Church Terrell is there in the back. But she is surrounded by other women who are part of this International Council of Women of the Darker Races. And they're all also members of the NACW, but they decide that they want to focus on a kind of pan-African, darker women of the races approach. And so they create a separate organization led by Margaret Murray Washington, who is the woman, yes, on the far right. And then you have Mary McLeod Bethune next to her, Margaret McCrory. And then standing up near... Yeah, that's Nanny Helen Burroughs. And on the other side is Lucy Sloan, who's the Dean of Women at Howard University. So she was always involved with a remarkable group of Black women activists. And they work together in multiple organizations over many, many decades. And so quite a few of the women show up in more than one of these photos, multiple decades apart. So when I say it's kind of hard to pick a particular movement to link her to, because in fact, except for if we talk about it as this long civil rights movement, before the kind of capital C, capital M civil rights movement of the post-World War II era. But all these women are working for these multiple causes for quite a few years. And in her case, the fight for suffrage includes picketing the White House in 1917 and 1918. But also includes fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment and lobbying Congress for it in most decades from the 20s, 30s, 40s and even the 50s. So what's remarkable is some of the continuities there, too. All right, I'm going to stop the share and come back to our discussion. Let's talk about her work in the 1930s and 40s. Around World War II. And I would ask this question of how would Terrell describe herself? Would she describe herself as a feminist or a womanist or a humanist? And as long as we're talking about organizations, NACW, NAACP, the International Women of the Darker Races, the Federation, which institutions did she help to establish? And in your opinion, what would she say about the longevity of these institutions? Like how would she describe the work that she did with these institutions? So I guess it's a couple of questions. How would she describe herself? And how would she describe the institutions that she founded? Well, I mean, I think that she would like all of those phrases. She would like to be called a humanist, a womanist and a feminist. I don't know that she would really want to make a distinction between them. One of my chapters I call her and talk about her black feminism. And the point of doing that is I don't know that she used those phrases, but she really embodies the notion of intersectionality, and she talks about it very explicitly, repeatedly. And so she and Anna Julia Cooper are those black feminist foremothers who really are laying the groundwork for the intersectionality that Kimberly Crenshaw described so nicely in the 1980s and 90s, and of course it's still doing today. But the point of it is that she wanted to talk about the fact that she had a particular experience as a woman and as a black person. And that she always said that there was a double burden or she was doubly crossed in the sense that women, white women just had to deal with gender discrimination and African American men only had to deal with racism, but black women had to deal with both sexism and racism. And she was very clear about the fact that she felt that that was a separate category and that it deserved attention as such. And so that's something that she was very clear about throughout her life. So she would want to think about herself as someone who was looking at civil rights and feminist women's rights at the same time in terms of her issues. But in the 30s, what's interesting about her time there, and it's been very understudied the 30s and 40s really, is that she was quite active in continuing some of the work that she had started earlier in really working on cross-class issues of solidarity, especially for black women. And at various points she was advocating for reduced prison sentences or clemency or against the death penalty for black women who had been accused of any kind of attack or self-defense against a black, I mean, sorry, a white man or a white woman who had attacked her. So the women who defended themselves against attack were often basically charged with murder and convicted and often condemned to death. And so she was really concerned about this and felt that it was quite unfair and that it really reflected the terrible position that black women were in where they couldn't defend themselves and that there was no one there to defend them. So she would go into prisons, meet with black women who were considerably lower class status than she was, unafraid of getting dirty or meeting with people who weren't of the right class, which is another part of this notion that she's elite but not elitist. And in the 30s, she's working with the communists in the William Patterson invites her to work with the legal defense fund and to really help them take up the cause of the Scottsboro Nine. And this is a cause that a lot of African-Americans joined with the Communist Party, even though they didn't necessarily always know that it was the Communist Party because this was the time at the popular front. So the communists weren't talking about revolution in quite the same way they did in other periods. They were just talking about things like rent strikes. We need to organize rent strikes and sign this petition. So later after World War II, a lot of African-Americans who signed a rent strike petition were being hauled up for their civil rights activism on charges of being communists. And that's kind of a dubious claim. Mary Church Terrell was more clear on who she was working with because she was doing more of the organizing. So she was perfectly clear on who these people were, but she was so concerned about these cases that were going through the criminal justice system without enough support from the NAACP. The NAACP in the 30s was not willing to take on a case like that of the Scottsboro Nine. If you have basically nine young black men charged with a gang rape of two white women, that was not the kind of case that the NAACP wanted to take up. They were much more concerned about laying the groundwork for the case that ended up being boundary board of education. So they were looking at school segregation, these other kinds of issues, and they were not wanting to take up things that raised up negative stereotypes about black men and kind of potentially led them down a path that they didn't want to go on. But Mary Church Terrell didn't care about that and went right ahead and defended the Scottsboro Nine and got together the Scottsboro Mothers to come to DC and try to meet with the White House and with the president and things like that. She also worked with cafeteria workers and picketed up in the campaigns that the National Negro Alliance was doing in the 30s that was for the don't buy where you can't work. So thinking about if there are stores in black neighborhoods and they won't hire any black people to work there, well, then don't shop, right? And so she was doing all kinds of interesting things like that during the 30s and 40s. Wow, wow. We have just a few minutes left. And so I wanted to actually switch gears for a little bit. But the transition is this. The way that people think about Mary Church Terrell now, perhaps in the 1940s and 50s, she is an older woman and she's often been described, or her work, her activism in the 40s and 50s was described as being of an older woman who had nothing to lose. And that's why she really steps in. And of course, you have explained that this was her ethos throughout her entire life. So I do want to, before I ask you the question, I'm going to share the screen again. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about these final two images. And that is, here she is with, here we are right here. Here she is with Thurgood Marshall. And here she is at Picketing. I can't quite find out where it is. But in our final few minutes, what I wanted to ask you is this. Can you describe her activism in the last decade of her life? And I also wanted to know where the idea for the book came from. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, let me start with that question that you asked about her last decades. And one of the things that is notable is that there is no full-length biography of Terrell that's been written in the last 50 years. There was one that was written by an NACW member, but it's more anecdotal than it is scholarly. So there isn't the kind of end note, you know, to back it up. But one of the things that a lot of children's books and young adult books about her do exist. And the story is always that she was very respectable and conservative and elitist. And then as you say, you know, became this radical activist when it was nothing left to lose at the end of her life. And I definitely disagree with that. And I try to tell a different story. And this last image here is of the last camp. She was doing two campaigns simultaneously starting in 1949 when she was in her late 80s. And both of them were run from the Civil Rights Congress, which was run by the Communist Party. And she was leading both of these efforts. This one was to desegregate the restaurants and stores in Washington, D.C. And the other one was a campaign also out of the Civil Rights Congress. And that was to free Rosalie Ingram, who was a poor sharecropper, a mother of 12 who was a widow. And she was attacked by a white sharecropper neighbor who had tried to sexually assault her in the past. And she and two of her young sons tried to defend her from him. And one of the teenage sons took the man's gun and hit him over the head with it. And when he died, they were charged with murder, as opposed to having this be seen as obvious self-defense. And they were sentenced to death. And when this became nationally known, she became the head of the free Rosalie Ingram campaign. But it was meant to free her and her children, the two sons who were imprisoned with her. And as she would fly down to Georgia, she met with the governor. She met with Rosalie Ingram and her sons in prison. This is something that she had done in other decades, starting as early as 1911. So once again, this is not a new thing. It's something that's part of a pattern. She also defended a woman named Carrie Lee Johnson, who was charged with murder during the 1919 race riots in Washington, DC, when whites were rampaging and attacking and killing blacks. And in her case, this teenage girl was hiding under her bed when white police officers, kind of like the Irish Memphis police when she was a child, came running up into this woman, Carrie Lee's house. And the teenage girl was charged with murdering the police officer, even or shooting at the police officer. I don't remember if he died, but she was charged with this. And there was not even evidence that she had shot a gun. So Terrell was deeply involved in trying to get this charge reduced and talking to all the district attorney to this, to that. She was always interested in these things. And so the end of her life is, it ramps up. But I think it's because the times have changed and the work that she's been doing gains traction after World War II. And there's a larger group of people who are willing to participate in it with her. So it's like she's, you know, the unceasing militant is a phrase that comes from Paul Robeson. And in his eulogy, he said, she's an unceasing militant struggling for the full citizenship of her people. And I do think that that's an accurate description in the sense that she was unceasing. She never stopped. And she never gave up hope. She always knew that social justice and change and reform would be something that would take multiple decades to do. And she could be very militant. There were times when she would pick it or she would, you know, do things like go sit in at a restaurant and risk arrest. There were moments like that that were quite confrontational. But she was also a pragmatist at other times and could be a really good diplomat and an ambassador with white elites and other whites, you know, as she tried to kind of use her privilege and her light and to, you know, enter into spaces that many black women couldn't enter into. So, but I liked the phrase and the idea that it captures of who she was, not just for the last couple of years or decade of her life, but throughout her life. So that's why I take that. Right. I really, and you answered the question I had on my mind, which was the meeting behind the title. So in our final question, in our final few minutes, can you talk about our legacy? What would you like this book to, what story would you like this book to tell that? I was going to say previous biographies haven't told, but we have to emphasize that there were, there have been no scholarly biographies of Mary Church Terrell. So what would you like the book to do? Well, I mean, I guess I would like to have her taken more seriously as a political thinker, as an activist, as someone who did participate in so many different movements and not just on the fringes of the movements, but at the center of these movements for so many decades. So that's one thing. I also think that this book can really talk to young people and others today about what social movements are like. And how they operate and how you can't give up hope and you have to keep working. And in her case, she believed in working on multiple fronts at once. She would go to multiple, multiple meetings of the NACW, the NAACP. She was going to sometimes five or six meetings a day. She just believed that the way to get things done was to take a multifaceted approach. So she was quite eclectic in her interests in terms of civil rights and women's rights. But that was the key focus. It was basically a kind of human rights campaign that she was willing to wage in any way that she possibly could. Oh, wow. Wow. Well, that is a great note to end on. That she realized that the work was never ending and that she was unceasing in the work that she knew that she had to do. So thank you so much, Dr. Allison Parker, for this really great discussion. And I want to thank the National Archives for giving us this opportunity to speak with each other on this terrific book. Here we go again, Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell. And I look forward to hearing more about this book and more about this great American in the future. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you for the conversation. I really appreciate it.