Activist, teacher Jeanne Terry dead at 104

Teacher and activist Jeanne Terry with her granddaughter Wakara Terry, Mayor Harold Washington, and Terry’s son, Don Terry in the late 1980s at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Hyde Park. Ms. Terry, an early member of the Congress of Racial Equality who taught at Sullivan House High School into her 80s, died Oct. 8 at age 104. (Provided)

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.