Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898)
On February 18, 1898, at a meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Mary Church Terrell delivered an address titled “The Progress of Colored Women.” She states in the address that the occasion marks the fiftieth anniversary of the NAWSA, but this is only partly true. This meeting of the association was held in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 in New York, which many historians regard as the official start of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. In part as a result of the Seneca Falls Convention, various suffrage organizations were formed, including the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The NAWSA in turn had been formed in 1890 as a merger of the two organizations. Terrell, one of the nation’s first African American women to earn a college degree, was active in the NAWSA and numerous other organizations. In 1896, for example, she had...
