---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 12:16 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Orr on Parker, 'Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell' To: <[email protected]> Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Alison M. Parker. Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 464 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5938-1. Reviewed by Katie Orr (The Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change) Published on H-Nationalism (April, 2021) Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera In his eulogy at the funeral of Mary Church Terrell, the legendary African American singer and activist Paul Robeson lamented, "America loses one of her great daughters, a worthy sister of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth in her unceasing militant struggle for full citizenship of her people."[1] In her 2020 biography of Mary "Mollie" Church Terrell, Alison M. Parker expands on Robeson's description of Terrell's deeds as militant to challenge the long-held interpretation of Mary Church Terrell as a conservative elitist in her early life and to reframe historical understanding of her motivations. Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell challenges the reader to see Terrell as a lifelong militant. This is a persuasive argument: Terrell was always militant, and the public has only seen her as such later in life because the entrenched white supremacy of two reigning political parties by the 1920s brought her Black feminist radicalism into focus when she had to move on from the Republican Party as an outlet for her activism. _Unceasing Militant_ offers a new understanding of the Black activist leader as the first full, traditional, historical biography of Mary Church Terrell. Parker, who is History Department chair and Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, argues that earlier biographical accounts of Mary Church Terrell's life "provide a compelling but inaccurate narrative arc, suggesting that Terrell was so concerned with respectability that she was less radical early in her career" and became more radical "in her old age only because she felt she had less to lose and was frustrated by the lack of progress on her cherished civil rights goals" (p. 300). Parker identifies her own Terrell as a complicated militant from an early age. This scholarship adds a new book to the growing shelf of reinterpretations of women activists as multidimensional and steadfast to their cause. (For example, Parker compares her ambition for Terrell to Jeanne Theoharis's 2013 _The_ _Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks)_. Mary Church Terrell is best known to history and the public's historical imagination for her leadership in turn-of-the-century Black social and civil rights organizations, primarily the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Parker tells those stories in great, engrossing detail. The book's chapter on Terrell's life during the Black women's club era is full of political intrigue and legal maneuvering that are far more engrossing than later chapters on partisan politicking in the federal government. This biography emphasizes Terrell's radicalism as a very young woman by describing her determination to make the most of her privilege and to not waste the advantages she was given. Examinations of her early life by Parker show that Terrell paid a price to refuse the chances she had to stay home or take a less challenging path in life. Mary Church was born in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents, Louisa Ayers Church and Robert Church, were both the children of white enslavers and enslaved women. They were given their fathers' names and received educations that were rare for enslaved Black children before emancipation. Parker explores the uncomfortable web of relationships and power dynamics into which Mary was born. Her biracial parents were married in the home of Louisa's enslaver-father, with their white family present to witness the union (p. 12). Parker was unable to determine whether the parents were legally enslaved at the time of the wedding or if Mary was born enslaved, but it is clear she was certainly born into a slave society and into the caste of people who were enslaved (p. 13). As a teenager, Mary Church was a serious student and begged her father to let her complete the full, four-year bachelor's degree at Oberlin typically only pursued by men. Robert Church wanted Mary educated and then at home until she married: "My father was the product of his environment. In the South for nearly three hundred years 'real ladies' did not work ... he wanted his daughter to be a 'lady.'" It is here that Parker draws out the point about a young and militant Mary Church: she was pressured to stay at home and be a lady, but she risked estrangement from her family patriarch to take the more challenging, radical life path (p. 29). The book's fourteen chapters are organized by the eras and concerns of Mary Church Terrell's life. The highlights of her adult life begin with her marriage to Robert Terrell, a recent graduate of Harvard and Howard School of Law whom she met while teaching in Washington, DC, and their heart-wrenching struggle to start a family. In the midst of her health trouble and depression, in the 1890s, she became increasingly involved in organizations dedicated to forwarding Black women's political and social equality. She was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and a speaker at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1898. _Unceasing Militant _argues that Terrell's presence in white spaces (such as the National Women's Party [NWP] and other white-majority activist organizations) spoke to her privilege as wealthy and light-skinned, not to any conservative values, and gave her access to a platform to work for all Black women. It also put her in the position to constantly bear racist comments or debate racism with men and women that she hoped would be her political allies. Parker argues that it was Terrell's calculating militancy, not comfortable moderation, that was expressed in her belief that "African American women ... must continue their attempts at interracial dialogue" (p. 131). Parker offers dozens of well-known stories from the historiography and shines new light on them to illustrate Terrell's militancy. Terrell's presence at picket lines during the fight to desegregate restaurants in the 1940s is often held up as an example of newfound militancy, but public activism was not a new development in her tactics. It was a return to old methods, as she and her daughter Phillis were on the White House picket line with the militant NWP in 1917 protesting for the right to vote. There is another chapter, "The Black Elite," that describes how her high status led her to cross paths with better-known names from the history of the Black freedom struggle, such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Parker narrates Mary's interactions with Washington and explains her motivations to show how Washington was angered by her militancy to the point that he wrote to her husband to "express his displeasure" with her involvement in the burgeoning NAACP in 1910 (p. 92). Terrell was also uncomfortable around "elitist" Du Bois: They once found themselves traveling on the same train and Du Bois scoffed when she told him she would not sit in the parlor car (p. 94). Parker focuses on her subject and narrative in the body of the book, and so the majority of her historiographical discussion appears in the endnotes. The book's endnotes and bibliography are extensive, with end matter accounting for a third of the full text. The final pages are a wealth of information for anyone studying Jim Crow-era Black civil rights struggles. Parker knows her subject so well because she has met with descendants and scoured papers in private, public, and university collections across at least five states in search of Terrell's life. In the notes and in the acknowledgements, Parker also cites her colleagues working on similar projects, including Stephen Middleton, professor of history at Mississippi State University, who is preparing his own biography of Mary Church Terrell's husband, Robert Terrell. At the core of the book are Mary Church Terrell's own words, written over the course of her life in a series of diaries and her own autobiography.[2] The book's cover displays a wealthy woman in a fantastically large hat, delicate lace around her neck, and the words "Unceasing Militant" splashed across the wide feathered brim. A prospective reader might look twice and doubt it, but Alison Parker brings to life a Mary Church Terrell who is proof of the power of persistence and a lifelong dedication to a seemingly hopeless cause. Born enslaved, Mary "Mollie" Church Terrell lived through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and desegregation. After spending her life fighting for access to segregated spaces, she lived to see "Separate but Equal" torn down, passing away months after _Brown v. Board of Education_ (1954) was decided. In her telling of the militant Terrell, Parker paints a portrait of a very relatable human figure with clear motivations: someone who hurts and is hurt, fears poverty and struggles to remain employed, falls in love and in lust, all the while speaking truth to power in the press, in the courts, and in society. Notes [1]. Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin, _Fight On! Mary Church Terrell's Battle for Integration_ (New York: Clarion Books, 2003). [2]. Mary Church Terrell, _A Colored Woman in a White World_ (Washington, DC: Ransdell, Inc., 1940). Read a 1941 review of the book here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/2715052. Citation: Katie Orr. Review of Parker, Alison M., _Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell_. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. April, 2021. 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