Mary Church Terrell Quotes

#1. It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great ...

Mary Church Terrell

#2. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Mary Church Terrell

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Mary Church Terrell

#6. 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

#7. I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.

Mary Church Terrell

#8. 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

#9. Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

Mary Church Terrell

#10. 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

#11. 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