Mary Burnett Talbert
1866-1923
Her accomplishments as a leader for equality.
A humanitarian and Civil Rights Founder
NAACP
1866 Mary Burnett was born in Ohio. William H. Talbert was born in Red Bluff, California to Robert Talbert and Anna Harris Talbert.
1886 At the age of nineteen, Mary Burnett received a literary degree from Oberlin College She moved to Little Rock, Arkansas.
1887 Burnett became a high school principal. She was the first Black high school principal in the state of Arkansas.
1891 Mary Burnett Talbert moves to Buffalo as the wife of wealthy businessman William H. Talbert. Her only a child, a daughter Sarah May, was born a year later.
1894 Mary B. Talbert received a second degree, Bachelor of Philosophy.
1899 Talbert is one of the founding members of the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Colored Women. This remarkable group of women, the city’s first affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, set an ambitious program of service to others in order to achieve the NACW mission
1900 In November Mary Talbert, along with other members of the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Colored Women, organized a protest rally at the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church. They called on the Board of Managers of the Pan American Exposition to include the Negro Exhibit, an exhibit that presented the achievements of blacks since Emancipation, in the upcoming Exposition. The group also advocated for the appointment of a colored commissioner. Mary Talbert was proposed as a most able and capable individual to represent the Negro community in this position.
- In contrast to the degrading Old Plantation Exhibition at the 1901 Pan American Exposition, Buffalo’s Black community lead by Mrs. John Dover, James Ross, and Mary Talbert met at the Michigan Street Baptist Church to promote a Negro Education Exhibit such as Booker T. Washington’s exhibit in Atlanta’s 1895.
- W.E.B. Dubois, John Hope, Monroe Trotter and 27 others met secretly in the home of Mary B. Talbert. This began the Niagara Movement.
- While serving as president of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Association, Mary Talbert was responsible for the restoration of the Frederick Douglass Home in Anacostia, Maryland. She also served as a delegate to the International Council of Women in Norway, and lectured internationally on race relations and women’s rights.
- Mary Talbert becomes a charter member of the Empire Federation of Women’s Club. She was the group’s second president from 1912-1916.
- Mary Talbert becomes president (the first of two two-year terms) of the National Association of Colored Women. As president and as vice president and director of the NAACP, Talbert joined the struggle for first-class citizenship for her people. As chairman of the Anti-Lynching Committee, she launched a crusade for passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. She traveled thousands of miles nationwide speaking to mixed audiences to gain support for the bill and her Crisis article Women & Colored Women demonstrates her inspiration.
- When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Mary Talbert assisted in the war loan drives, personally soliciting the purchase of thousands of dollars in Liberty Bonds. She becomes a Red Cross nurse with the American expeditionary forces in France. Returning home at the close of the war, she found that the idealistic slogan of fighting to make the world safe for democracy was false for the American Negro.
- Talbert is rebuffed by national feminist group.
- Talbert is the first Black woman to win the NAACP Springarn Award.
- Mary Burnette Talbert died in 1923 and is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery and Garden Mausoleu