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Mary Church Terrell at the Age of 86, Mary Mary Church Terrell At the age of 86, Mary Church Terrell led and won the struggle to desegregate Washington, D.C.’s dining establishments. In recognition of this remarkable accomplishment and the singular life that preceded it, the site of one of her greatest civil rights victories – the old Hecht’s department store and several accompanying parcels, now being developed by CarrAmerica Urban Development, LLC - is being named Terrell Place in her honor. Born in 1863 to former slaves, Mrs. Terrell could have lived a life of quiet privilege. Her father, Memphis, Tennessee’s first African-American millionaire, would have preferred it. Instead, she studied to be one of the first African-American women to receive a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in 1884. Over the next two years, she continued her education with a Grand Tour of Europe, becoming fluent in French, German and Italian. Her multilingual skills were very useful in her later work to gain international women’s suffrage. In 1891, she married Robert Terrell, with whom she had a daughter, Phyllis. Their home at 326 T Street, N.W. is recognized today on the National Trust of Historic Places. Robert was a teacher and a lawyer who later became the first African-American judge on Washington’s Municipal Court. Also a teacher, Mrs. Terrell received her master’s degree from Oberlin and three honorary doctorates during her lifetime. She was the first African-American woman to serve on a U.S. board of education, and a Washington, D.C. elementary school bears her name. She served as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and was one of the founders of the NAACP. The earliest inspiration for her life’s work came from her father’s friend Frederick Douglass. It was through Douglass that she gained her first experience in civil rights campaigns. She wrote several books, including her 1940 autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. By 1950, segregation was the accepted way of life in Washington, D.C. Housing, public education, health care, and the hospitality industry were divided on racial lines. But Mrs. Terrell was old enough to remember that “in the 1890s, a colored person could dine anywhere in Washington.” That was ensured by laws passed in 1872 and 1873 requiring all eating places “to serve any respectable, well-behaved person without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” These so-called “Lost Laws” were dropped when the D.C. Criminal Code was recodified. Mrs. Terrell’s fight to reinstate the Lost Laws galvanized the movement to integrate post-World War II Washington. A lawsuit to accomplish this was filed in 1950. For the next three years, Mrs. Terrell and the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of D.C. Anti -Discrimination Laws she chaired targeted other segregated restaurants through the use of boycotts and picket lines. Their most visible target was the Hecht Company department store on Seventh Street – the site for Terrell Place. They began to boycott Hecht’s segregated lunch counter with the slogan “Don’t Shop where you can’t Eat”. This was reinforced for six months with a picket line that formed every Thursday night, Friday lunch hour, and all day Saturdays. Remembering the Lost Laws’ requirement that a patron be a “well-behaved person”, Mrs. Terrell ensured this was the best-dressed picket line ever. She even arranged for newsworthy guest picketers, including her friend Josephine Baker, the world famous singer and dancer. The picketing ended when Hecht’s quietly changed their policy, a decision Mrs. Terrell acknowledged by patronizing the lunch counter with three African-American journalists. In 1953, following a judicial path marked by challenges and obstacles, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Washington, D.C.’s segregated eating establishments to be unconstitutional. Writing for the court, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “the acts of 1872 and 1873 survived… and remain today a part of the governing body of laws applicable to the District.” Until her death in 1954, Mrs. Terrell continued to enjoy the newly re-integrated Seventh Street corridor she helped make a reality. With the development of Terrell Place, CarrAmerica hopes to once again bring a vitality to the area worthy of her memory. .
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