On September 23, 1863, Mary Church Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She became an educator, suffragist, and civil rights activist. But one of her most remarkable victories came near the end of her life, and it depended on a law that Washington, D.C., had seemingly forgotten.
During Reconstruction, the city passed laws requiring restaurants, hotels, even “ice cream saloons” and barbershops, to serve “any respectable, well-behaved person without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude or face a fine and forfeiture of license. But decades later, they had become dormant. In 1944, Howard University law students went looking through old D.C. statutes and found something the city had apparently forgotten. The statutes still existed.
Six years later, an 86-year-old Terrell and other activists deliberately entered Thompson’s Restaurant in downtown D.C. and asked to be served. They chose Thompson’s specifically because it sat near offices of lawyers building a case against racial discrimination in public accommodations. When they were refused, they had the test case that eventually reached the US Supreme Court as District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. In 1953, the Court ruled that those Reconstruction-era laws were still valid and Washington's segregated restaurants could no longer legally refuse Black customers.
Terrell celebrated her 90th birthday that September. She had spent a lifetime asking America to keep its promises of equality. In this case, the promise was already written into law. The problem was that Americans had learned to forget it.
