ABSTRACT
Mary Eliza Church Terrell could have ignored the plight of her race and gender during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Terrell was born to a life of privilege, for her father was the south’s first black millionaire.2 Terrell wrote in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, that her father bought property in Memphis during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1879, and “he invested every penny he had saved in real estate which was being offered at a bargain.”3 He and his ex-wife gave their daughter virtually everything she could desire-love, an education at one of the country’s renowned private colleges and travel abroad. Therefore, it would have been easy for Terrell to remain aloof and unconcerned, sheltered from the difficulties blacks encountered during the post-Civil War era. Instead, this daughter of a former slave chose to become an advocate for blacks and women through her work as a journalist and activist. Terrell has been called one of the leading twentieth-century black women activists. References and other works dub her a poet, lecturer, writer, suffragist, and educator.4 However, scholars rarely acknowledge Terrell as a journalist when documenting the history of the press.
