Mary Church Terrell Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

Mary Church Terrell
Some people cannot bear the truth, no matter how tactfully it is told. No doubt the haughty, the tyrannical, the unmerciful, the impure and the fomentors of discord take a fierce exception to the Sermon on the Mount.

Mary Church Terrell
Please stop using the word 'Negro'... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.

Mary Church Terrell
Nobody wants to know a colored woman's opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called 'propaganda,' or is labeled 'controversial.' Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me.

Mary Church Terrell
A white woman has only one handicap to overcome — that of sex. I have two — both sex and race.... Colored men have only one — that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.

Mary Church Terrell
As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

Mary Church Terrell
I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, but had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.

Mary Church Terrell
It is a great pity the word "Negro" was not outlawed in the Emancipation Proclamation as it certainly should have been. After people have been freed it is a cruel injustice to call them by the same name they bore as slaves.

Mary Church Terrell
I will not shrink from undertaking what seems wise and good, because I labor under the double handicap of race and sex; but, striving to preserve a calm mind with a courageous, cheerful spirit, barring bitterness from my heart, I will struggle all the more earnestly to reach the goal.

Mary Church Terrell
Lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.... Seeking no favors because of our color nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice and ask for an equal chance.

Mary Church Terrell
No young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.

Mary Church Terrell
It is impossible for any white person in the United States, no matter how sympathetic and broad, to realize what life would mean to him if his incentive to effort were suddenly snatched away. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

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 the Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawns so wide and deep.

Mary Church Terrell