Description
To kick off Women’s History Month, join biographer Dr. Alison Parker (University of Delaware) at the Delaware Historical Society on Thursday, March 5 to learn about the voting rights activism of Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights activist, clubwoman, and suffragist.
In 1920, soon after the passage of the 19th Amendment, Mary Church Terrell was threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct when a white railroad ticket agent in Dover, Delaware, realized she was there to give a speech organizing newly enfranchised Black women voters. Terrell denounced this as a first attempt to suppress Black women’s voting rights above the Mason-Dixon line.
Dr. Parker’s talk will place this incident in Dover into the broader historical context of Mary Church Terrell’s advocacy for Black women’s voting rights and participation in partisan politics.