Stephanie Gilbert Challenges: Saving Family Underground Railroad Artifacts

Stephanie Gilbert discusses the importance of identifying, documenting, preserving, and sharing artifacts from the history of African American families.

• The Fugitive Slavery Ads
• Mary Church Terrell's Inscribed Book "A Colored Woman in a White World" 
• Rescuing the Family's Underground Memoir 
• The Coin Collection

• Mary Church Terrell’s Story

  Mary Church Terrell was born to slavery surviors. Her father owned several successful businesses, and was one of the first Black millionaires in the South.

  Church Terrell attended Oberlin College, in 1888,  She studied  in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. 

  She married Robert Terrell an African American federal judge. 

  In 1892, Church Terrell’s childhood friend Thomas Moss was lynched. She along with her journalist friend Ida B. Wells, became one of the first people to speak out publicly about lynching. In 1894, Terrell founded the Colored Women’s League with Anna Julia Cooper. The League merged with other organizations to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896,

  Terrell served on the Washington, D.C. school board for over a decade, beginning in 1895, and became the first Black woman to serve on a board of education in the United States. 

  Terrell was also a founding member of the (NAACP) in 1909. She marched for voting rights  at the 1913 Suffrage Parade, and helped to organize the 1922 Silent March, to pressure Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation. 

  In 1925, Mary Church Terrell began writing her memoir, A Colored Woman in a White World, which she was unable to sell to publishers, and self-published in 1940.