Grant and the Terrells: Acts of kindness and civil rights milestones

The saying “No man is a hero to his valet” was clearly not coined with Ulysses S. Grant and Harrison Terrell in mind. Terrell, who had been born into slavery two decades before the Civil War, spent a number of years after the war working as a butler for a prominent Washington family before being hired by Grant to serve in the same capacity during his residency in New York City during the 1880s.

When the former president’s health declined, Terrell served as his personal attendant. He nursed Grant, giving him constant attention, during his race to complete his memoirs as his body was ravaged by cancer. (Terrell is visible in the last photo ever taken of Grant.) During the years after Grant’s death on July 23, 1885, Terrell extolled his former employer’s “loyal faith in friends, unpretentious manners, generosity, and, above all, his uncomplaining fortitude and courage,” as paraphrased by a newspaper, and called him “the truest gentleman and the most honest man that ever lived.”

Less than two months before his death, Grant, of his own volition, wrote Terrell a recommendation letter praising his “attention, integrity and efficiency” and adding, “I hope you may never want for a place.” The following year, Terrell was promptly appointed to a position in the Paymaster General’s office after the letter was presented to President Grover Cleveland and his secretary of war.

Even before that recommendation, Grant had sent two recommendation letters on behalf of Robert H. Terrell, Harrison’s son, who depended on what he earned during vacation to work his way through college. Robert became the third African American to graduate from Harvard University, the first to graduate with honors, and the first to be commencement orator.

He embarked on a career in education and—after earning a law degree at Howard University—in law in the nation’s capital. In 1901, he was appointed a justice of the peace by President Theodore Roosevelt, and he later sat on Washington, D.C.’s municipal court after it was created by Congress, making him the first African American judge federally appointed to a position above justice of the peace or magistrate.

He served as a judge until his death in 1925, a feat that required the support of every president faced with the question of whether to reappoint him to another term. Even President Woodrow Wilson, whose administration was notorious for its regression on race, could not resist the groundswell of support for Terrell, whom the president called “the best judge of his rank in the District.” Judge Terrell praised Grant as the most deserving of “imperishable renown” among great Americans. He added, “It was during the administration of President Grant that the Negro began his official as well as his political career”—a reference to office-holding and the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell, Robert’s wife, was born in Tennessee in 1863 to parents who had been enslaved. Among the first African American women to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she had a storied career as an educator—teaching and sitting on the D.C. school board—and civil rights leader. She was a force of nature. Elected the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, the year the Supreme Court validated state-imposed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, she was among the founders of the NAACP and played a prominent role in a host of other efforts to defy the scourge of Jim Crow and advance women’s suffrage.

As chair of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws, Mary led a successful battle to integrate restaurants in the District of Columbia during the early 1950s. That struggle entailed negotiating, picketing, lawsuits and other tactics that would be employed years later during the better-known Montgomery bus boycott and sit-in movement. Her test case, taken up by the D.C. government, made it all the way to the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. The D.C. laws at issue, enacted in 1872 and 1873, prohibited restaurant proprietors from discriminating on the basis of race. An 8–0 court rejected arguments that the 1873 provision had been repealed either explicitly by statute or by non-use as the government had long left it unenforced.

Mary was 89 when the court handed down its decision in 1953. She lived to see the court strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine more broadly in Brown v. Board of Education the following year before she died at age 90 on July 24, 1954, 70 years ago and a day after the anniversary of Grant’s death. One of her earliest political memories was her “childish partisanship for Grant, which that great general undoubtedly deserved” as he ran for reelection in 1872.

Grant’s second term would include passage of the first anti-segregation statute of national scope, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1883 during the backlash to Reconstruction. Mary Church Terrell’s revival of the D.C. law of the same era is a fitting coda to the story of President Grant and the Terrell family—a story of mutual respect and acts of kindness that helped shape a dimension of America’s civil rights story that is too often overlooked.

Frank Scaturro, author of President Grant Reconsidered and The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction and co-editor of Grant at 200, is president of the Grant Monument Association.