Early Life and Education
Mary Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayers, both former slaves. Robert Church was mixed-race and said to be the son of his white master, Charles Church. He acquired considerable wealth investing in real estate in Memphis. Multiple sources refer to Church as the first black millionaire, although it is now generally accepted that his wealth reached only about $700,000. When Terrell was six years old, her parents sent her to the Antioch College Model School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, for her elementary and secondary education. Terrell, known to members of her family as "Mollie," and her brother were born during their father's first marriage, which terminated in divorce. Their half-siblings, Robert, Jr. and Annette, were born during their father's second marriage, to Anna (Wright) Church.
When Terrell majored in classics at Oberlin College, she was an African-American woman among mostly white male students. The freshman class nominated her as class poet, and she was elected to two of the college's literary societies. Terrell also served as an editor of The Oberlin Review. When she earned her bachelor's degree in 1884, she was one of the first African-American women to do so. Church earned a master's degree from Oberlin in 1888.
Read more about this topic: Mary Church Terrell
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men.... It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)