Terrell began her career as a teacher. After her marriage to Washington lawyer Robert Terrell, she became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association where she became a spokesperson for the particular concerns of African-American women. A passionate advocate of education, Terrell sold her speeches during this period in order to raise money for a kindergarten.
Black women's groups were routinely excluded from national women's organizations during the late nineteenth century. It was their exclusion from participation in the planning of the 1893 World's Fair, however, that spurred Terrell and other black women leaders to form the National Association of Colored Women, organized in 1896. Also known as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, it was created to serve as an umbrella organization for black women's groups throughout the country. Under Terrell's leadership, the NACW worked to achieve social and educational reform and to end discrimination based on gender and race.
- Learn more about the work of African-American educators and reformers. Browse the subject index of African American Perspectives, 1818-1907, particularly the subheading on African-American women which appears as Afro-American women.
- Search the collection Words and Deeds in American History on the keywords African American to retrieve items such as a chapter from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
- Learn more about the history of the struggle for civil rights in the exhibition African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
- Search the Today in History Archive on suffrage or civil rights to learn about more events and leaders in the struggles for women's right to vote and civil rights for people of color.
