Mary
Burnett
was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1866. After graduating from Oberlin College,
she became a teacher at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Eventually she became vice principal but left teaching after marrying
William Talbert and moving to Buffalo.
Talbert obtained a Ph.D degree at the University of Buffalo and during
the First World War she served as a Red
Cross nurse on the Western Front.
Talbert was the president of the Christian Culture Congress and the
National Association of Colored Women (1916-21). A founder member
of the National Association for the Advancement
of Coloured People (NAACP), she was for several years its director.
After the First World War Talbert toured Europe
giving lectures on women's rights and race
relations. In 1921 she travelled thousands of miles making public
speeches in an attempt to gain support for Dyer's anti-lynching
bill. Mary Talbert died in 1923.
(1)
Mary
White Ovington, letter
to Lucy
Burns
of the National Woman's Party
(17th December, 1920)
I am writing to you as an advisory member of the
National Woman's Party asking if you will arrange that at the meeting,
February fifteenth, a colored woman be invited to speak. I would suggest
as the speaker, Mrs. Mary B. Talbert, until last June president of
the Federation of Colored Women, and this
summer one of the ten official members of the International Council
of Women which met at Christiana. Mrs. Talbert is able, liberal in
thought, and perhaps the best known colored woman in the United States
today.
There was little voting and much terrorizing
of Negroes in the South during the past elections and at Ocoee, Florida,
there was a massacre. But equally sinister was the refusing to register
women at such a place as Hampton, Virginia, where Hampton Institute
has through many years endeavored to maintain kindly feelings between
the two races, and yet where colored women were so insulted when they
attempted to register that one woman said: "I could kill the
clerk who questioned me; I could kill his wife and children."
If the South means to awaken a spirit like this
it will eventually have war to face. But I believe that the Negro
woman can win her right to vote if she is upheld by the rest of the
country. The thinking southern woman is generally more fairminded
than the southern man, but she cannot secure justice for the colored
woman without she has the backing of all of us.
Will you not therefore, endeavor to have a committee
appointed out of your great meeting in February which shall investigate
and take some action regarding the status of the colored woman? The
Woman's Party must have in its membership, South as well as North,
women of broad enough vision and deep enough purpose to attack this
problem. And if the women attack it, it will be solved.
(2)
Mary
White Ovington, letter to Alice
Paul
of the National Woman's Party (4
January 1921)
Not being a member of the National Woman's Party, I wrote to the members
of the National Advisory Council whom I
knew asking them if they would interest themselves in having a colored
woman appear on the program of the Woman's Party Conference in Washington
in February. Mrs. Brannan wrote me enthusiastically that the New York
State Branch of the Woman's Party unanimously decided in favor of
a colored speaker upon the program, but she telephoned me yesterday
that you did not find this possible and asked me to address my communication
directly to you.
The difficulty, as I understand
it, seems to be that it has been necessary for the Woman's Party to
restrict its program to representatives from organizations which have
undertaken a more or less distinct feminist program and that Mrs.
Talbert, whose name I suggested as today the most distinguished colored
woman speaker in the country and as an ex-President of the National
Association of Colored Women, would not be able to speak at your session
because she does not represent a feminist organization.
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