Mary Church Terrell

Terrell's work was done mostly in Washington. From 1895 to 1906 she sat on the District of Columbia school board, the first African-American woman appointed to the school board of a major city. In 1913 she and Ida B. Wells pushed back when organizers of a suffrage parade meant to send Black women to the rear, and Terrell marched with the New York delegation. In 1946 the Washington chapter of the American Association of University Women, which she had once joined, refused to reinstate her, and she kept after it until it admitted Black members.

What the plaque says

Mary Church Terrell 1863-1954 Born in Memphis in 1863, Mary Church Terrell was noted as a champion of human rights. The daughter of millionaire Robert Church, Sr., she was graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and later made her home in Washington, D.C. In 1904, she was a delegate to the International Council of Women in Berlin, where she was the only woman to address the group in French, German and English. A 1909 charter member of the N.A.A.C.P., she was an active worker for women's suffrage and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in the 1950s she lead marches to desegregate restaurants in Washington, D.C. She authored A Colored Woman in a White World.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.2 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 0.6 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.6 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.7 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Church Park — steps away
• Sara Roberta Church 1914-1995 — steps away
• Nat D. Williams — steps away
• Universal Life Insurance Building / Universal Life Insurance Company — steps away