Mary Church Terrell, an African-American Civil Rights activist and suffragist, lived and studied abroad in Germany and Switzerland as a part of her travels in Europe in the late 19th century. Terrell documented her experiences as she went, and included them in her 1940 autobiography, A Colored Woman in the White World, recalling her European travels among other stories of her life.
Terrell was born in 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents were both formerly enslaved people who, post-Civil War, became affluent: her mother owned a hair salon and her father, a businessman and landowner, became one of the South’s first African-American millionaires. Earning a Bachelor’s degree in Classics at Oberlin College in Ohio, Terrell went on to teach in Washington D.C and then returned to Oberlin to earn her Master’s degree in Education. In 1896, Terrell co-founded the National Association for Colored Women. Later, she would be one of the charter members of the NAACP.
After earning her Master’s degree, Terrell spent time attending a private girls school in Lausanne, Switzerland where she climbed mountains with her host family, improved her French and “acquired many new points of view.” After spending a year in Switzerland, she moved to Berlin, Germany, where she studied and improved her already advanced knowledge of the German language. In her autobiography, she details the methods by which her worldview changed such as socializing with intellectuals, attending the opera and spending time with an African-American man she knew from home. In 1904, Terrell was invited back to Berlin to speak at the International Congress for Women, and was the only woman of African descent invited to speak. Initially planning to address the crowd in English, she changed her mind and delivered her addresses in German, for which she received three encores and a standing ovation. She also delivered another speech in French.
Terrell’s experience abroad greatly informed the work she continued to do when she returned home. Her time in Germany and Europe influenced her activism because it gave her a comparative perspective on women’s rights and Civil Rights. She had a lot of mobility in Europe compared to the United States, and was able to see the differences between attitudes of the United States and the several countries which she visited.
– Kate Schreiber (University of Missouri)
Source:
Mary Church Terrell via The United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b47842.
Mary Church Terrell (1863 – 1954) by Kate Schreiber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://blackcentraleurope.com/who-we-are/.
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