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History & Celebrations Today – September 23

Celebrations Today – September 23

Holidays and observances

Celebrations Today – USA: September 23

National Snack Stick Day*
National Singles Day
National Checkers/Dogs in Politics Day
National Great American Pot Pie Day
Celebrate Bisexuality Day
Restless Legs Awareness Day (Different sponsor from the July Weekly Observance)
Innergize Day – Day after the Autumn Equinox
National Hunting and Fishing Day – Fourth Saturday in September
National Family Health and Fitness Day USA – Last Saturday in September
Great American Pot Pie Day
National Checkers Day
National Dogs in Politics Day
National Restless Legs Awareness Day
National See You at the Pole

Today in US History: September 23

Mary Church Terrell

Not only are colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are everywhere baffled and mocked on account of their race…Desperately and continuously they are forced to fight that opposition, born of a cruel, unreasonable prejudice which neither their merit nor their necessity seems able to subdue.Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women,” February 18, 1898.
African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907.

Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell
ca. 1880-1900.
By Popular Demand: “Votes for Women” Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Mary Church Terrell—educator, political activist, and first president of the National Association of Colored Women—was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee. An 1884 graduate of Oberlin College, America’s first college to admit women and amongst the first to admit students of all races, Terrell was one of the first American women of African descent to graduate from college. She earned her master’s degree from Oberlin in 1888.

Terrell began her career as a teacher. After her marriage to Washington lawyer Robert Terrell, she became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association where she became a spokesperson for the particular concerns of African-American women. A passionate advocate of education, Terrell sold her speeches during this period in order to raise money for a kindergarten. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman to serve on the Washington, D.C., school board in which she served until 1905 and again from 1906 to 1911.

Black women’s groups were routinely excluded from national women’s organizations during the late nineteenth century. It was their exclusion from participation in the planning of the 1893 World’s Fair, however, that spurred Terrell and other black women leaders to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. Also known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, it was created to serve as an umbrella organization for black women’s groups throughout the country. Under Terrell’s leadership, the NACW worked to achieve social and educational reform and to end discrimination based on gender and race. In 1940, Terrell wrote her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, a work that used her own more than seventy years of life as an example of the difficulties that blacks faced in a predominantly white society.

Oberlin College scene
Oberlin College Student Body and Faculty in Front of Memorial Hall,
Oberlin, Ohio, 1906.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

Today in History – September 23-External Links

Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia