The papers of Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) span the years 1851 to 1962, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1886-1954. Consisting primarily of diaries, correspondence, printed matter, clippings, and speeches and writings, the collection focuses on Terrell's career as an advocate of women's rights and equal treatment for African Americans. Born to a prosperous Memphis family in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, she witnessed the transition from the systematic dismantling of Black rights following Reconstruction to the early successes of the civil rights movement after World War II. Her own life chartered a course that extended from organizing the self-help programs promulgated by leaders such as Booker T. Washington to directing sit-down strikes and boycotts in defiance of Jim Crow discrimination. She died in 1954, several months after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, having herself waged several successful court battles in the fight against segregation in Washington, D.C.

The Terrell Papers reflect all phases of her public career. They show her as lecturer, as club woman, as writer, and as political campaigner. Among the issues she addressed were lynching and peonage conditions in the South, women's suffrage, the Equal Rights Amendment, the franchise for African Americans, and the need for educational programs for African Americans. She spoke and wrote frequently on these matters, and the texts of most of her statements, whether brief introductory messages or extended essays, are in the Speeches and Writings file. Examples of the range of her writings include several reminiscences of Frederick Douglass, a dramatization of the life of Phillis Wheatley, and numerous articles on African-American scientists, artists, and soldiers. Also in the collection are copies of a feature column, "Up to Date," which she wrote for the Chicago Defender, 1927-1929.

Terrell was an active proponent of unity among Black women, a key example of which was her instrumental role in forming the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and serving as its first president. Among the groups featured in the Correspondence series in the papers are the National American Women Suffrage Association, the National Woman's Party, and the International League for Peace and Freedom. Her Progressive Era involvement with moral and educational issues is illustrated in records from the National and International Purity Conferences she attended and in correspondence concerning her participation in programs on behalf of the YWCA and the War Camp Community Service in World War I.. Documented in correspondence and clippings files are her two terms on the District of Columbia School Board. As the first Black woman on the board, she was the recipient of revealing letters from school officials and others on the problems of an urban, segregated school system.

The Subject File in the Terrell Papers is comprised mainly of printed matter. Exceptions include holograph reports and drafts relating to the formative years of the National Association of Colored Women and the interview and travel notes she kept while touring the South in 1919 in the employ of the War Camp Community Service. Significant in her biographical and testimonial files are the materials Terrell retained from the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws, the committee which successfully assaulted the color line in Washington, D.C., movie houses and restaurants.

In her political philosophy, Terrell pursued a middle course between the gradualist approach expressed by Booker T. Washington and the more aggressive stance of W. E. B. DuBois. "If we stay out of every good thing because some narrow, mean, nasty people belong to them," she wrote her husband, Robert H. Terrell, in 1909, in reaction to critics who attacked her readiness to work within regular political channels, "we shall develop into specimens as contemptible as these people are and do no good besides." She subsequently accepted supervisory positions in the presidential campaigns of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, and in 1929-1930 was invited by Ruth Hanna McCormick to direct her senatorial efforts among Black voters in Illinois. Evident in the papers also, however, is her outspoken criticism of racial segregation and her willingness, ultimately, to picket businesses and established institutions in Washington when she thought it necessary to achieve her goal.

Terrell's personal affairs and family relations form a relatively small part of the collection, but correspondence with immediate family members is introspective and revealing, particularly letters exchanged with her husband, a federally appointed judge whose papers are also in the Library of Congress. Her letters to Robert give insight into the attitudes and private thoughts of a public figure who was a wife and mother as well as a professional. Except for a diary or journal written in French and German documenting her European tour of 1888-1890, Terrell kept diaries sporadically. A fuller autobiographical source is the draft material to her published life story, A Colored Woman in a White World.

Prominent correspondents include Jane Addams, Mary McLeod Bethune, Benjamin Griffth Brawley, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Carrie Chapman Catt, Oscar DePriest, W. E. B. DuBois, Christian A. Fleetwood, Francis Jackson Garrison, W. C. Handy, Ida Husted Harper, Addie W. Hunton, Maude White Katz, Eugene Meyer, William L. Patterson, A. Phillip Randolph, Jeannette Rankin, Haile Selassie, Annie Stein, Anson Phelps Stokes, William Monroe Trotter, Oswald Garrison Villard, Booker T. Washington and Margaret James Murray Washington, H. G. Wells, and Carter Godwin Woodson.

Terrell occasionally wrote drafts of articles on the reverse sides of correspondence, and these letters are in the Speeches and Writings file. In selected instances, such letters have been copied and placed in the Correspondence file.