Sabrina Evans on Mary Church Terrell’s Situational Resistance
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought, interviews Sabrina Evans, Assistant Professor of English at Howard University, about her most recent journal article, “Exposing the Racial Illogics of Jim Crow Segregation: Mary Church Terrell’s Situational Resistance.” The article won the 2025 Maria Stewart Prize for the best journal article in Black intellectual history published in Global Black Thought.
Dr. Sabrina Evans specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women’s writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is a JT Mellon Satellite Partner with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, serving as project co-coordinator for the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.
Ashley Everson: How did Mary Church Terrell’s embodied resistance aboard Jim Crow trains offer a uniquely gendered critique of segregation?
Sabrina Evans: Terrell, like several other Black women intellectuals and clubwomen of the time, was well aware of the racial and gender illogic of segregated spaces on Jim Crow train, in which compartments labeled “For Colored” or “For Ladies” did not even consider the fact that if you were Black and a woman, you could, presumably, sit in either section. Terrell exploited that loophole, sometimes sitting in the “Colored” section and sometimes in the “Ladies” section depending on her inclination that day. That is why she embodies the idea of situational riding as a form of resistance—sometimes she decided to test these segregation policies and other times, she did not. Sometimes she chose to pass to reach her final destination safely, especially when traveling through the South, other times she did not. But it was the power of choice in this situational riding that allowed her to take some power back and to question whether train personnel could truly discern one’s race based solely on physical appearance.
Everson: Your work brings Terrell into dialogue with theorists like Brittney Cooper. How do you see her concept of “embodied discourse” expanding Black feminist theory?
Evans: Cooper’s concept of embodied discourse invites a different way of reading Black women intellectuals, particularly during the nineteenth/early-twentieth century, one that asks you to look beyond how they might conform to a culture of dissemblance, i.e. hide their bodies, and instead consider how they resist it, or incorporate their bodies and experiences into their texts. In thinking about Terrell’s focus on her travel experiences in her autobiography and diaries, we see how she develops a critical perspective on how Jim Crow segregation impacts Black girls’ and women’s perception of their bodies in public space, particular on trains.
Terrells’s physical and verbal encounters with train personnel throughout the different stages of her life–as a young girl, teen, woman, then mother–allowed her to share and speak to different resistance strategies that she passed onto her daughters and addressed in her public speaking.
Everson: What challenges did you face when working with Terrell’s scattered and underutilized archival materials?
Evans: One of the main challenges was navigating the massive amount of archival materials that she has. Much of her material is housed at the Library of Congress, although she also has a significant amount of materials at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University and at Oberlin College, where she received her bachelor and master’s degree. Another was that some of her earlier materials are written in German and have not been fully translated yet, something that I hope gets done in the future. I was interested in examining her diaries because she wrote in them consistently around the time that she was traveling, lecturing, and organizing within the Black clubwomen’s movement. Speaking of Brittney Cooper’s idea of embodied discourse, it really showcased the difficulties she faced in balancing her public-facing work and life and detailed so many more encounters she had onboard trains with conductors and passengers.
Everson: Can you speak to how travel became a generative site for Black women’s intellectual production?
Evans: For so many of Terrell’s contemporaries of the time, including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, travel was essential to their public intellectual lives, first as students, then as educators, public speakers, and activists. The ways in which segregated train policies exposed Black girls and women to both racial and sexual violence, whether they transgressed these policies or not, were not being brought to the forefront of criticisms of Jim Crow law. Writing and speaking about travel allowed them to have these intersectional conversations about race, gender, and civil rights while also critiquing white chivalry in which white women received the protections of a “Ladies” car but not Black women.
Everson: What might Terrell’s situational strategies of resistance teach us about the contemporary politics of surveillance, travel, and bodily autonomy?
Evans: Her situational strategies offer us an earlier example of Black women’s resistance to violence onboard public transportation that predates the bus boycotts of the Civil Rights movement, establishing a tradition of Black women being at the forefront of the politics of travel. It invites a trickster-practice of sorts that in understanding the racial and gender illogic of segregation policies then and surveillance protocols now, enables Black girls and women to establish strategies of their own to either evade detection or to fight back. It makes me think so much about how we can draw a genealogy between Terrell’s resistance and that of which Simone Browne discusses in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
Everson: How can scholars and educators better teach Terrell’s intellectual contributions beyond her organizational affiliations?
Evans: A great starting point would be to read her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, which is her own expression of how her upbringing and education informed her organizational and intellectual work. Then, read her essays and speeches—she was one of the most prolific writers and speakers of her time and so much of her intellectual work has been preserved in her archive. With my own students, I often pair one of her speeches or essays with work from her contemporaries: Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, etc. Placing Terrell within this cohort decenters the oftentimes preoccupation with the Du Bois/Washington debate and inserts Black women into that conversation to provide a larger spectrum of Black political thought during the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century period.
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