Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://www.history.udel.edu/people/faculty/aparker?uid=aparker

Keywords: African American, biography, women, social movements, legal and constitutional, women's right activism and suffrage, 19th and 20th Century U.S.

About Me: Alison M. Parker is Chair & Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in women’s and gender history, African American history, and legal history. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Her book, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell is part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture of the University of North Carolina Press (2020). Among other publications, Parker is the author of two monographs, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997). She also serves as the founding editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press. As a co-chair of the University of Delaware’s Anti-Racism Initiative, Parker is helping to build a coalition of students, faculty, and staff promoting a wide-ranging anti-racism agenda.

Recent Publications: Alison Parker is author of the new biography of Mary Church Terrell, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell.

Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States.

Drawing on newly discovered letters and diaries, Parker weaves together the joys and struggles of Terrell’s personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career, producing a stunning portrait of an often-under recognized political leader.

Media Coverage: “Mary Church Terrell & the Black ‘Mammy’ Statue,” C-SPAN Lectures in History, April 2021;“Civil Rights Activist: Mary Church Terrell,” National Archives and Records Administration conversation, aired on C-SPAN American History TV, February 202