The principles of Martin Luther King and Gandhi surely were somewhere in the back of teacher Jeanne Terry’s mind as she stood between a teenage girl waving a 2-by-4 and hurling threats at a male classmate outside Sullivan House High School.
White-haired and in her 60s or 70s at the time, Ms. Terry calmly talked the teenagers down, recovered the board and sent the students on their way, recalled Curtis Lawrence, a family friend who observed the tense scene as he waited to give Terry a ride home.
“I’m sure she never gave it a second thought, but I was like, ‘Oh no.’ She would never have thought of it as courageous to come between two people about to come to blows,” said Lawrence, a journalist and Columbia College Chicago associate professor who was a surrogate son to Ms. Terry.
“To her, nonviolence wasn’t a statement or some catchphrase, it was how she lived her life. Those kids, they loved her so much.”
Ms. Terry’s career as a teacher and activist began soon after she left her husband back on a farm in her hometown some 80 miles away from Chicago. In the years that followed, she was arrested while trying to integrate a South Side tavern with fellow activists from Congress of Racial Equality; shared a dinner table with King at his home during the Montgomery bus boycott; risked ostracism from her family by marrying a Black man; and raised two generations of biracial children as a single mother.
She died Oct. 8 at the home of her son, Don Terry, a former journalist who is now a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. Ms. Terry was 104.
Ms. Terry arrived in Chicago as the civil rights movement was reaching high ferment in the 1950s, and perhaps no part of the city was tuned into the teachings of King as the Hyde Park-Kenwood area of the South Side where she settled for the next seven decades.
“I’m not sure what drew her to it, other than a sense of fairness, of sticking up for the little guy, the underdog,” Don Terry said.
Born Jean Ober in 1918, Ms. Terry lived with her aunts on a farm near Woodstock, Illinois, and visiting her parents often at their home in Rogers Park. She moved to Chicago for high school, graduating with honors from Senn High School.
Ms. Terry returned to the Woodstock area at age 25 to marry the son of a well-to-do local farmer, with whom she had sons David and Robert Wesson. Eight years into the union, the marriage broke up, and Ms. Terry returned to Chicago with her two sons.
She had become active in the civil rights movement through the Unitarian congregation and in 1957 was arrested with a group of CORE activists who attempted to stealthily integrate Jennie’s, a whites-only bar and grill in Grand Crossing. As an unassuming white woman, Ms. Terry had visited Jennie’s and tried to persuade the bartender to serve Black patrons and was rebuffed. She returned with an integrated group of CORE members.
A row ensued — or didn’t, depending on varied witnesses’ accounts in a 1957 appeals court ruling that overturned Ms. Terry’s guilty verdict on a charge of disorderly conduct. Some witnesses said some of Ms. Terry’s group shouted and demanded service or lay on the floor as staff told them to leave. Other witnesses described Ms. Terry as calmly talking “in a conversational tone and without objection from other patrons” and handing out leaflets.
Ms. Terry admitted she had gone to the bar with the goal of persuading managers to allow Black patrons by “words and nonviolent action.”
“She defined nonviolent action as ‘action taken to achieve a change with love, without rancor, without violence of any kind, physical or any other type of violence, words, mental, emotional, and so on.’”
Ms. Terry met Bill Terry a Black activist, union organizer and actor, at a Hyde Park party around the time of her arrest. The relationship was turbulent. Ms. Terry’s commitment to nonviolence and personal calm was a stark contrast to the former boxer, but the couple soon had two children, Don and daughter Diane.
“My mother would always turn the other cheek. My father wanted to throw the other fist,” Terry said. After a violent argument, the couple separated in 1962.
Ms. Terry became a teacher working in public schools and alternative schools. Her last post, and the one she loved most, was at Sullivan House High School, a “last-chance” alternative school where she worked into her 80s, Don Terry said. In her 60s, while still working full time, she took in Diane’s daughter, Wakara, and raised her as well.
“I think she had settled into being more of a conventional grandmother with me. She wasn’t one to bake cookies or knit, but I always felt completely loved, seen and heard,” said Wakara Terry.
A lifelong lover of books and short stories, Ms. Terry left behind a draft memoir that runs hundreds of pages, said Don Terry, who is editing the manuscript.
“It’s very good already,” Don Terry said. “It’s a tour through the 20th century.”
Plans for a memorial service are pending.
