Mary Church Terrell

"Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep."

 Mary Eliza Church was born on September 23, 1863 to free, middle-class parents in Memphis, Tennessee. She attended elementary and high school in the north, and received a bachelor's degree in the classics from Oberlin College in 1884, serving as editor of the Oberlin Review and being named class poet. She was one of the first African American women in the country to earn a college degree. She then taught at Wilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio and at M Street High School (now Dunbar High) in Washington DC before returning to Oberlin for a master's degree. She then studied in Europe for two years, and when she returned she married Robert H. Terrell, her supervisor at M Street.

Married women were not allowed to teach at the time, and she became active in women's suffrage and civil rights movements, writing and lecturing throughout the south and the east.  In 1896 she became president of the newly-founded National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She served on the Washington DC Board of Education from 1895 through 1906, the first African American woman in the country to hold such a position. In 1904 she was invited to participate at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, and she gave her speech in German and French as well as English.

Along with Ida Wells-Barnett, Terrell was one of the two African American women signing the call that led to the formation of the NAACP in 1909. She was also a founder and charter member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. During World War I she worked with the War Camp Community Service, providing recreation and demobilization help for African American servicemen. After the war she was a delegate to the International Peace Conference in London. When the 19th amendment gave women the vote she was elected president of the Women's Republican League during Harding's campaign in 1920.

Terrell continued her public appearances for civil rights with the goal of educating the white population about the discrimination, lynching and disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 1950 at the age of 86 she participated in a sit-in at Thompson's Cafeteria in Washington, and was part of a lawsuit filed when the group was not served. Three years later the Supreme Court in their favor, which was the beginning of desegregation in Washington. She died July 24, 1954 at the age of 90 in Annapolis, Maryland.

Mary Burnett Talbert

“The hour has come in America for every woman, white and black, to save the name of her beloved country from shame by demanding that the barbarous custom of lynching and burning at the stake be stopped now and forever."

Mary Burnett Talbert was born September 18, 1866 in Oberlin, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College in 1886 with a degree in literature. She taught at Bethel University in Little Rock for one year and then became assistant prinicipal of  Little Rock's Union High School, the first African American woman in the country to be an assistant principal.

In 1891 she married William Talbert and moved with him to his home town of Buffalo. She was a founding member of Buffalo's Phyllis Wheatley Club in 1899, the city's first affiliate with the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which organized efforts to include an African American exhibit in the Buffalo's Pan American Exhibition of 1901 and to protest a plantation exhibit.

Meetings to organize the Niagara Movement were held in Talbert's home in 1905. She was also a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, forming a Buffalo chapter the next year and later serving as a national board member and anti-lynching committee chair. She was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1921, the first woman to receive this honor.

Talbert also worked to stop lynchings through the NACWC, which she served as national president from 1916 to 1920. During this time she was a delegate to the International Council of Women in Norway, and spoke throughout Europe about the conditions facing African Americans in the United States. Other priorities of the NACWC under her leadership were women's suffrage, prison reform, and restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home.

In addition to public speaking, Talbert wrote essays on a variety of topics, including the Achievements of African Americans in Twentieth Century Negro Literature. She died on October 15, 1923 at the age of 57.

Carl Rowan

"We ought not think of this involvement in citizenship only in terms of something somebody would call charitable. . . . If somebody on this campus, a handful of students, said 'You know, I can stop this polarization by getting involved in some organized way in making use of diversity, making diversity work'--that would be a tremendous service." ~ Carl Rowan, quoted in Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Winter 1995

Journalist, cabinet member and ambassador Carl Thomas Rowan was born August 11, 1925 in Ravenscroft, Tennessee. He graduated from high school as valedictorian and class president, briefly attending Tennessee State University where he took part in a training program enabling him to become one of the first African Americans to serve as a commissioned officer in the U. S. Navy during World War II.

After the war Rowan attended  Oberlin College where he had trained while in the Navy, graduating in 1947 with a degree in mathematics. The next year he earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota and worked on two African American weekly newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Register. He was soon hired by the Minneapolis Tribune as a copywriter, becoming a staff writer in 1950, extensively covering the Civil Rights Movement. A series of columns exploring racial issues led to his first book, South of Freedom, published in 1952, and he became the only journalist to win three Sigma Delta Chi awards in a row from 1954 to 1956.

Rowan was named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs by President Kennedy in 1961, overseeing news coverage of military involvement in Vietnam. He was part of the negotiating team that secured the exchange of pilot Francis Gary Powers and served as a delegate to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963 he was appointed Ambassador to Finland, and in 1964 was named Director of the U. S. Intelligence Agency, thus becoming the first African American to be on the National Security Council.

With President Lyndon B. Johnson

Rowan left government service in 1966 to resume his career in journalism. He wrote a widely read syndicated column for the Chicago Sun-Times until 1998, and appeared as a panelist on Inside Washington. He received the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1988, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995, and received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement in 1999.

Rowan founded Project Excellence in 1987 to provide college scholarships for African American youth in the Washington DC area who excel in writing and speaking. The organization has awarded $76 million to almost 3000 students. He died in Washington DC on September 23, 2000 at the age of 75.

Anna Julia Cooper

"It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis womans strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice."

Anna Julia Haywood was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on August 10, 1858 to Hannah Stanley Haywood, an enslaved woman, and George Washington Haywood, her master. She attended St. Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute, an elementary and teachers' training school in Raleigh, where she battled to take the courses usually reserved for boys.

After graduation she married George Cooper, a Bahamian-born Greek instructor, who passed away two years later. She then enrolled in Ohio's Oberlin College, again insisting on taking the "gentleman's course", graduating in 1884. She taught briefly, then returned to Oberlin to earn a master's degree in mathematics in 1887. She then was hired to teach math and science at M Street High School in Washington, DC, later known as Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, and became principal in 1902.

Cooper began coursework on her doctorate at Columbia University in 1914, while continuing her duties at M Street and after the death of her brother raising his five grandchildren. She transferred to the University of Paris Sorbonne, receiving her degree in 1925 at the age of 64 and becoming only the fourth African American woman to earn a doctorate. She continued working at M Street until her retirement in 1930, and then became president of Frelinghuysen University, a night school for working people. She stepped down as president in 1940, but served as registrar for another 10 years.

Cooper's only book, A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South, published in 1892, established her as the first African American feminist. She was a speaker at the World's Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to a primarily white audience, saying "I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny is evolving." She was also one of the few female speakers at the 1900 First Pan African Conference in London organized by W. E. B. DuBois.

Cooper founded the Colored Women's League of Washington in 1892, and was instrumental in starting YWCA chapters for African American women. She also helped to organize the first chapter of Campfire Girls. She died  on February 27, 1964 at the age of 105.

Willa Player

"We don't teach our students what to think. We teach them how to think. If I have to give exams in jail, that's what I'll do." ~ Willa Player

Willa Beatrice Player was born August 9, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi and moved to Akron Ohio as a child. Few college opportunities were available for African American women at the time but with contacts made through the Methodist church her family was active in, she was able to attend Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. She graduated in 1929 and earned an MA from Oberlin College the next year. She was immediately hired to teach Latin and French at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a women's school also affiliated with the Methodist Church. She did post-graduate work at the University of Grenoble, France under a Fulbright Scholarship, and received her EdD from Columbia University in 1948.

Dr. Player quickly rose in the administration of Bennett, serving as Director of Religious Activities, Director of Admissions, Coordinator of Instruction, Vice President, and in 1956 was named President, becoming the first woman to serve as President of any four-year accredited college in the country. When no other institution in Greensboro was willing to host a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. for fear of retaliation by segregationists, she offered the Bennett facilities, saying, "Bennett College is a liberal arts school where freedom rings." She describes this, as well as a campus visit by Eleanor Roosevelt, in an interview by the Civil Rights Greensboro Oral History Project.

Undated Photograph from
DuBois Archives, UMass Amherst

King's speech may have planted the seed for the sit-ins that followed in February 1960 as North Carolina A&T students protested segregation at Woolworth's lunch counters. Bennett students, faculty and staff joined the protests; at one time about 40% of the Bennett student body was under arrest. While Dr. Player did not encourage students to protest, she supported those who did and were jailed, visiting daily and arranging for professors to hold class for them and give exams.

Dr. Player left Bennett College in 1966 to become Director of Development of College Support for the US Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare where she initiated the Strengthening Developing Institutions program to gain financial support for minority schools. After her retirement in 1986 she returned to Akron where she served on many church and educational boards, and was named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame.

Dr. Player never married, saying, "I didn't have time for men. I was too busy educating the youth." She died on August 27, 2003 at the age of 94.