The Problem of Plenty: Sources and a Biography of Mary Church Terrell

Alison Parker is working on a biography of Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), the first president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in 1896, a founder of the NAACP in 1909 and a leading activist against lynchings, convict lease labor programs, and segregation until her death in 1954.  While some biographies pose questions about how to reconstruct a life with a relative dearth of sources, Terrell presents the opposite problem.  There is almost an overabundance of sources (including 35 reels of microfilm from her collections at the Library of Congress and another collection at).Parker speculates that this plethora of sources may be one reason why no one has written a full-length biography of her.  At this point, there are at least six biographies of Terrell written for children or high school students.  Parker would like to explore with the panel and the audience about why this might be the case. She is using Terrell's diaries to try to uncover more about her personal life, which is relatively unknown, and connect what she has discovered to Terrell's activism and her political thought. Terrell’s diaries, however, are very cryptic and pose problems of their own.  Like other feminist biographers, Parker plans to be open about the process of writing a biography—about the investigation, inquiry, and selection that goes into creating a biography.  Her biography will focus on Terrell as a central actor, from the perspective of her own lived experience