Quote

The elective franchise is withheld from one half of its citizens...because the word 'people,' by an unparalleled exhibition of lexicon graphical acrobatics, has been turned and twisted to mean all who were shrewd and wise enough to have themselves born boys instead of girls, or who took the trouble to be born white instead of black.

Mary Church Terrell

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Mary Church Terrell
Age: 90 †
Born: 1863
Born: September 23
Died: 1954
Died: July 24
Civil Rights Advocate
Feminist
Politician
Suffragette
Suffragist
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Mary Eliza Church
Black
Boys
Franchise
Enough
Wise
Exhibitions
Acrobatics
Mean
Trouble
Twisted
Elective
People
Word
Turned
Shrewd
Half
Girls
Withheld
White
Citizens
Lexicon
Born
Took
Unparalleled
Girl
Instead
Exhibition

More quotes by Mary Church Terrell

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While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.
Mary Church Terrell
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... 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
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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
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No one color can describe the various and varied complexions in our group. They range from the deep black to the fairest white with all the colors of the rainbow thrown in for good measure. When twenty or thirty of us meet, it is as hard to find three or four with the same complexion as it would be catch greased lightning in a bottle.
Mary Church Terrell
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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
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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
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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
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It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great.
Mary Church Terrell
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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