What it Means to be Colored in the Capital, (10 October 1906) Washington D.C.

Context

As more Black people migrated to Washington D.C. following the Civil War, many white citizens perceived the nation’s capital to be a place that granted Black people the leisure of white society. In 1894, one citizen wrote in the Hawaiian Star that the capital was “a negro aristocracy.” This writer claimed that Washington D.C. was “one spot on earth where a part of their number has a social standing, and where they are something more than mere hewers of wood and drawers of water.”¹ By the early 1900s, the U.S. Census documented that of the 270,000 people living in the capital, Black people comprised over one-third of the population.² Due to increased migration, Washington D.C. was nationally described as the “Colored Man’s Paradise,” because the capital had the highest urban population of Black people in the nation’s capital. Working-class Black people served in many community leadership roles from school board members to physicians, lawyers, college professors, and doctors. Black people in D.C. also earned more money than the average Black American during this time.³

Yet, not all agreed that D.C. served as a paradise for African American empowerment and standing. Mary Church Terrell played an instrumental role in challenging this myth of D.C. as a promised land for Black people. Terrell spent over fifty years living in Washington D.C. and often described the capital as “far from ‘paradise for colored people.’”⁴

Terrell was born in September 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee to formerly enslaved people. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, Terrell’s parents, Robert Reed Church and Louisa Church, became prosperous. Her mother was the first Black woman to own a hair salon in Memphis, where upper-class women bought curls and chignons.⁵ Her father established himself as a business leader and was one of the first Black millionaires of the South. Because of her parents’ financial status, Terrell had the privilege of living in a wealthy Black family and received an outstanding education compared to other Black students of her time. She was the first Black woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in 1884 and a master’s degree in 1888 from Oberlin College.⁶ Terrell taught at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, and then moved to Washington D.C. to teach at the M Street Colored High School.⁷ There, she met and married Robert Terrell, who became the first Black lawyer to serve as a judge in Washington D.C. from 1902 to 1925.⁸

Terrell was intrinsically motivated to fight for civil rights and Black woman suffrage. She was a paid public speaker who published newspaper articles, served on the school board in D.C., and served as a delegate for two international women’s conventions in Europe.⁹ As a community leader, Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a highly educated Black woman, Terrell used her platform to not only address the oppression of the Black community, but also illuminate the struggles Black women faced daily. She was one of the most renowned Black woman speakers of her time.¹⁰

Fluent in English and German, Terrell was a powerful speaker who had the ability to persuade both Black and white communities with her words. For example, in June of 1904, Terrell delivered the following speech in German, “Address to be delivered at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, Germany.”¹¹ Many Black and white leaders were awed by Terrell’s ability to speak fluently in other languages. In the Sedalia Weekly Conservative, woman suffragist Ida Husted Harper stated that “the eloquence of her words, carried the audience by storm. . . It was more than a personal triumph, it was a triumph for her race.”¹² Booker T. Washington, in the same newspaper, characterized Terrell as one who “speaks out of cultured mind and quickly wins a sympathetic response from her audience.”¹³ Terrell was a highly-gifted and motivated speaker who used her words to spotlight the inequities that confronted all Black citizens.

Terrell delivered her October 10, 1906 speech, “What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” during a time when Black people were fighting against Jim Crow laws and struggling to gain public recognition for their Civil War contributions. Jim Crow laws were created by state and national officials to enforce segregation across the United States from the 1870s to the 1960s; Washington D.C. was not exempt from facilitating such segregation. In the nation’s capital, Black people faced voting restrictions, attended under-funded public schools, ate in separate facilities, and held low-paying jobs.¹⁴ Black people were forced to submit to white authority and were sometimes arrested, assaulted, or even lynched when they rebelled. Black people were also rarely honored for their labor during the Civil War. On the day after his election in November 1906, President-elect Theodore Roosevelt released the U.S. Army from their obligation of service to the country without first honoring the Black troops who fought in the Civil War.¹⁵ While Roosevelt denied the significance of the slight, many Black and white citizens were very critical of this discharge. Joseph Foraker, a Republican Senator for Ohio, brought this racist dismissal to the U.S. Senate to challenge how the government treated Black battalions.¹⁶ Terrell’s speech occurred during this sensitive moment where many Black people were fighting for equitable treatment, respect in civic life, and recognition for military service. And Black people tried to debunk the myth that their increased presence in D.C. represented a symbol of their freedom.

Terrell used her public platform to fight against the misconception of D.C. as the “colored man’s paradise.” Her “What it Means” speech was delivered at the United Women’s Club meeting in Washington D.C. The speech was reprinted in the Iowa County Democrat and the Independent in 1907.¹⁷ Terrell challenged the belief that D.C. was a utopia for Black people by illustrating how systemic barriers on education, housing, and jobs hindered their ability to engage in civic practices. Following this speech, Terrell spent many years in the nation’s capital working assiduously to stop discrimination and segregation. Ambitious and passionate about civil rights, Terrell used her platform to cut down the barriers that hindered Black people, especially Black women, from obtaining full citizenship. In 1954, she lived long enough to witness the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision—Brown v. Board of Education— that desegregated public schools.¹⁸ That same year Terrell passed away, leaving behind a legacy of activism, leadership, and determination.

1. “Washington’s Colored 400,” The Hawaiian Star, January 30, 1894, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015415/1894-01-30/ed-1/seq-4.
2. U.S. Census Bureau, “Demographic Characteristics of the District and Metro Area,” District of Columbia Office of Planning, May 23, 2012, https://planning.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/op/publication/attachments/Chapter%25202.pdf.
3. “Our African Aristocracy: Washington the Seat of the Best Colored Society,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), June 18, 1888, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/our-african-aristocracy/docview/174192694/se-2?accountid=14696.
4. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in A White World (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1986), 88-106; 383.
5. Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), 121.
6. Terrell, A Colored Woman in A White World, 45-64.
7. Allison Parker, Unceasing Militant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 1; Terrell, A Colored Woman in A White World, 45-71.
8. Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A Lowe, From Megaphones to Microphones: Speeches of American Women, 1920-1960 (Westport, CN.: Praeger, 2003), 11.
9. Parker, Unceasing Militant, 2.
10. “Because of Her Story: Activist and Suffragist Mary Church Terrell,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, March 30, 2020, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/because-her-story-activist-and-suffragist-mary-church-terrell.
11. Mary Church Terrell, “Address Delivered at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, Germany,” Mary Church Terrell Papers: Speeches and Writings, June 13, 1904, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mss425490363.
12. Ida Husted Harper, “Mrs. Mary Church Terrell,” Sedalia Weekly Conservative, February 11, 1907, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89067598/1907-02-11/ed-1/seq-1/.
13. Booker T. Washington, “Mary C. Terrell Most Noted Lady Lecturer in America of Washington D.C.,” Sedalia Weekly Conservative, February 18, 1907, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89067598/1907-02-18/ed-1/seq-1/.
14. Joseph Boskin, Urban Racial Violence in the Twentieth Century (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1969).
15. See: “Report on Brownsville Affray,” United States Senate, 59th Cong., 2 Sess., No. 155; Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The Brownsville Episode and the Negro Vote,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, no. 3 (1957): 470.
16. Joseph B. Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life (Cincinnati, OH: Johnson and Hardin Printers, 1916), 231-232.
17. Mary Church Terrell, “What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” The Independent, January 24, 1907, https://ohio5.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15963coll16/id/566/; Mary Church Terrell, “What it Means to be Colored in the Capital,” Iowa County Democrat, April 11, 1907, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86086852/1907-04-11/ed-1/seq-5/.
18. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).