Mary Church Terrell

Terrell, one of the first Black American women to earn a college degree, founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 under the motto "Lifting as we climb" and argued at suffrage conventions that white suffragists must not trade away Black women to win Southern support. After 1920 she pressed on against the barriers that still kept Black women from voting in the South, and in her late eighties led the sit-ins that desegregated Washington's restaurants.