This is C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast.

This week, activist Mary Church Terrell's 1923 fight against the United Daughter's

attempt to build a black mammy statue in Washington, D.C.

University of Delaware professor Alison Parker describes how Terrell,

a civil rights activist and suffragist, organized opposition, and successfully prevented the

statue from being built. Hello, I'm Allison Parker, and I teach at the University of Delaware.

Welcome to this session of History 633, my graduate course in modern American history.

In this course, we've been reading and thinking about race, gender, and social protest movements,

including those for women's rights and civil rights. Today, we're going to be adding the issue of representations, Confederate lost-cause monuments in particular,

to discuss how they display power and were used to shape our understanding of American history.

The debates will be discussing about monuments and memorialization

from the late 19th to the early 21st century can help us put our

continuing debate over the meaning and power of public monuments into a longer and more

informed historical perspective. In this lecture, I'll delve into the story of what one proposed

monument meant to the civil rights activist and feminist,

Mary Church Terrell, especially in light of her own family's history of enslavement.

In 1923, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC, pressed lawmakers in States to create a pass a bill to create a monument to the faithful colored mammies of the South.

Whereas in 1913, white women had unsuccessfully sought to keep black women out of Washington DC's national suffrage parade.

A decade later, they tried to fix them permanently in a subordinate,

though ostensibly celebrated position on a monument in the nation's capital.

To make sense of this, I'll be taking a couple of steps back in time from 1923.

First, let's go back to 1894.

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