Mary Eliza Church was born on September 23, 1863 in Memphis,Tennessee - part of the South - during the Civil War. Her parents, former slaves, were small business owners – her mother a hairstylist, her father the South’s first black millionaire – and staunch advocates of education. Starting at age seven, Mollie was sent away to school in the North, in Ohio, where schools were not segregated.

After high school, Mary attended Oberlin College “the first college in the country which was just, broad and benevolent enough to open its doors to negroes and to women on an equal footing with men,” she later applauded. With a passion for languages, a degree in the classics and a Masters in education, Mary landed her first job as a teacher of modern language at Wilberforce University. Two years later she moved to Washington, D.C., a gathering place for intellectual blacks nicknamed “the Colored Man’s Paradise.” There, she taught in the Latin department at Washington’s M Street High School where her future husband Robert Heberton Terrell was principal. They married in 1891.

Mary Church Terrell’s accomplishments were many and significant. She helped form the Colored Women’s League in 1892, which merged with the Federation of Afro-American Women to form the National Association of Colored Women. Terrell coined the group’s motto: “Lifting As We Climb.”

From 1885 to 1901, Terrell served on the D.C Board of Education where she had the opportunity to give many speeches. In 1904, she spoke at the International Congress of Women in Germany and delivered her speech in German, then French and English. By 1906, she was one of the most prominent black women in the country. She was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – NAACP in 1909, and fought for women’s right to vote as well as for equality for all black citizens. In 1910, she helped found the National Association of College Women. Terrell marched in the 1913 Washington, D.C. parade, picketed the White House with her daughter, wrote numerous articles including What It Means To Be Colored in the Capital of the United States published in The Independent, and wrote a book entitled A Colored Woman in a White World.

Mary Church Terrell spent her life fighting for equality through education and social activism.