Mary Church Terrell, transnational foremother

As today's guest blogger at IntLawGrrls, I would like to dedicate my contribution to Mary Church Terrell (left).
Born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell was a women’s rights activist, peace activist, and civil rights leader:

► In the United States she became known, among other things, for her activism and leadership in the suffrage and desegregation movements. She was the 1st president of the National Federation of Colored Women and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (photo credit)

► Internationally, Mary Church Terrell became known around the world for raising awareness through her speeches about the situation and achievements of African Americans. She was the vice president of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, as well as a member of the American delegation to and a speaker at the International Congresses of Women in Berlin, German,y in 1904 and 1919. Mary Church Terrell was also chosen by the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom as a speaker at the 1919 Quinquennial International Peace Conference in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1937, she delivered an address before the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faith in London, England.

Terrell was the author of numerous articles and short stories on segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States and, in 1940, she wrote her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World.

She worked consistently for a better future for all. As she said in a speech before the National American Women's Suffrage Association on February 18, 1898:

With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope.

Terrell died at age 90, at her home in Maryland, on July 24, 1954 -- 2 months after the U.S. Supreme Court held racial segregation of schoolchildren unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

On June 17

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Althea Simmons (left), who from 1979 until her death in 1990 would lead the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and so serve as the NAACP's chief lobbyist in the capital, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was a graduate of that state's Southern University, of the University of Illinois, and of Howard University School of Law in Washington. According to her obituary, Simmons

successfully lobbied for the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, the creation of a holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sanctions against South Africa and the subsequent Congressional override of President Ronald Reagan's veto.

After Simmons' death, a tribute to her was read into the U.S. Senate record.

... 1944 (65 years ago today), the birthday of independence leader Jón Sigurðsson, Iceland became independent from Denmark and formed a republic. This day is celebrated every year as Iceland National Day. The Old Covenant of 1262 had established the sovereignty of Norway and ended the independent republic in Iceland. Late in the 14th century, Iceland became a Danish dominion. In 1918, by the Act of Union agreement, Iceland was declared a free and independent state, but the Danish king continued to function as king of Iceland. In a May 1944 referendum, Iceland voted to end the union. (credit for 2007 photo of national day procession in Reykjavík, Iceland)

(Prior June 17 posts are here and here.)

On February 12

On this day in ...
... 1809 (200 years ago today), 2 men of lasting renown were born. 1st, in Shrewsbury, England, Charles Darwin (left) was born into a wealthy family -- his mother was from the Wedgwood porcelain clan, and his father was a doctor and financier. Interested in natural science from a young age, Darwin served from 1831 to 1836 "as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world." His discoveries, particularly those on the Galapagos Islands, led to his development of a theory of evolution and publication of the landmark The Origin of Species (1859). Here you can find Darwin's complete works online. 2d, on the same day, thousands of miles away, in rural Hardin County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln was born. His White House web bio quotes Lincoln's own account of his origins:

'My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families -- second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all.'

He'd go on, of course, to become the 16th U.S. President, credited inter alia with vanquishing the Southern states' rebellion (at times using means that curtailed civil liberties, as we've posted here and here and here), issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, and commissioning the Lieber Code, a compilation of the laws and customs of war that influenced international instruments like the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

... 1909 (100 years ago today), in New York, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People launched its 1st civil rights campaign. The date was no accident. A cofounder, Mary White Ovington (below right), wrote on the NAACP's 5th anniversary:

Of course, we wanted to do something at once that should move the country. It was January. Why not choose Lincoln's birthday, February 12, to open our campaign? We decided, therefore, that a wise, immediate action would be the issuing on Lincoln's birthday of a call for a national conference on the Negro question.

To publicize the decision, she wrote, organizers issued a call that began:

'The celebration of the Centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, widespread and grateful as it may be, will fail to justify itself if it takes no note of and makes no recognition of the colored men and women for whom the great Emancipator labored to assure freedom. Besides a day of rejoicing, Lincoln's birthday in 1909 should be one of taking stock of the nation's progress since 1865.
'How far has it lived up to the obligations imposed upon it by the Emancipation Proclamation? How far has it gone in assuring to each and every citizen, irrespective of color, the equality of opportunity and equality before the law, which underlie our American institutions and are guaranteed by the Constitution?'

As Dr. Clayborne Carson underscored in his superb February 4th address launching the California International Law Center at King Hall, UC Davis School of Law, these questions linger 100 years later.

On October 21

On this day in ...

... 2003 (5 years ago today), a politician who'd made her name opposing desegregation of Boston schools, Louise Day Hicks (right), died at age 87. She was elected to the city's Schools Committee, to its City Council, and to a term in Congress. In the words of the Boston Globe, Hicks "came within 12,000 votes of being elected mayor of Boston in 1967 and earned a national reputation as a symbol of racial divisiveness." In those of an NAACP official: "'She was a tragic figure. She became an object of hate -- and she asked for it.'" She was, as well, a feminist: an attorney, a member of the National Organization of Women, and a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

... 1952, "following the declaration of a state of emergency in the British colony of Kenya" came the arrest of nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta and a hundred other Kenyans. Kenyatta was "accused of leading the extremist wing of the Mau Mau and of inciting hatred and violence against Europeans"; 6 months later, he would be convicted and sentenced to 7 years' hard labor. Kenyatta resumed political activity upon his release, becoming Kenya's 1st Prime Minister in 1963 and its 1st President in 1964; today he's featured on the Kenyan bank note at left.

On July 2

On this day in ...
... 1908 (100 years ago today), Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After earning his J.D. from Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., began practicing as counsel for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; eventually he would join the NAACP's national staff and become its Chief Legal Officer. His achievements included successful pursuit of litigation that led to Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954); service as a federal appellate judge; service as Solicitor General of the United States; and service as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the 1st African-American to hold the latter 2 posts. Marshall died at age 84 in 193. His contributions to the Constitution of Kenya are profiled in Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (above left), the new book by our colleague Mary Dudziak (right).
... 1782, Geneva surrendered to a coalition of French, Sardinian, and Bernese troops, bringing to an end the "Geneva Revolution" that had been inspired by the city's native philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who'd died on the same day 4 years earlier. Works of Rousseau like Du contrat social/The Social Contract (1762) soon would influence revolutions in America and France.

On June 15

On this day in ...
... 2000, 6 weeks after they arrived to quell violence, the major portion of British troops left civil-war-torn Sierra Leone. They had entered, according to the BBC, "because a peace deal between government and rebels had broken down and rebel forces were scoring successes against the Sierra Leone army and the UN peacekeeping force." With the British departure responsibility for security in the West African country was returned to the United Nations. (map credit)
... 1920, a mob of thousands took part in the lynching of 3 men in Duluth, Minnesota. The victims were among 6 circus workers who'd been jailed on charges that they had committed robbery and sexual assault, charges "for which little to no evidence was garnered." The rest of the story:

The Minnesota National Guard came the next day to restore order and protect the three surviving black prisoners, but irreparable damage had been done. Black residents of Duluth felt unsafe in their hometown. Over time, a significant number chose to leave the city for good. Newspapers all over the country were appalled that such a horrible thing had happened in a Northern state. Justice for the atrocity appeared nonexistent in the following weeks, as only three people involved in the lynching received any type of incarceration – and that for rioting, not murder. ...
The lights in this dark section of Minnesota’s history are twofold. First, a local Duluth
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1920 as a result of the ordeal. Second, after much work by the black community including Nellie Francis, a social activist from St. Paul, an anti-lynching bill was created and signed into Minnesota law in 1921.

Francis (above right), an African-American Republican, is among the 25 women profiled in The Privilege for Which We Struggled: Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Minnesota (Heidi Bauer ed. 1999). In 2005, the U.S. Senate apologized for its failure to pass a federal anti-lynching bill.

On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1935, a ceasefire was reached in the Chaco War between Bolivia (flag at right) and Paraguay (flag at left). The 3-year conflict had resulted in 100,000 casualties. In a landmark decision respecting the roles of Congress and the President, the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), would find constitutional the government's prosecution of the defendant corporation on charges that it had illegally conspired to sell machine guns to Bolivia.
... 1963 (45 years ago today), an assassin shot civil rights activist Medgar Evers dead outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers had moved there several years earlier with his wife, Myrlie, to begin work as the NAACP's 1st field secretary. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Conviction for his murder finally came in 1994, decades after the defendant, Byron De La Beckwith, had avoided conviction in 2 separate trials. From 1995 to 1998 Myrlie Evers-Williams, who had pressed for the retrial, served as the 1st woman chair of the NAACP. (credit for photo of Evers family)