Peggy Terry was born in Haleyville, Oklahoma, on October 28, 1921. She spent her childhood moving back and forth between Oklahoma and Kentucky where her father found work in oil fields and coal mines. In 1936, she married her first husband at age fifteen and moved to the South, where the couple worked in Texas and Alabama as itinerant farmers.
For the next 20 years, Terry struggled through failed marriages and continued to move around the country with her children. In 1956, she left her third husband and moved her children to Chicago and then Michigan to start a new life. She and her fourth husband, Gil Terry, returned to Chicago in the early 1960s during the height of African Americans' struggle for civil rights in the United States. Chicago during this period was racially segregated and like many other cities at this time, African Americans were taking steps to end segregation through protests and sit-ins organized by grassroots organizations. In 1963, in response to this racially charged atmosphere, Terry joined the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an inter-racial organization that worked to end segregation. She became an active member of the group through her participation in boycotts and sit-ins.
In 1963 Terry also participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In the aftermath of this event, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) Community Union to provide assistance for whites who had migrated from the South and resided in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. In 1964 local Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Monroe Sharp introduced Terry to JOIN and she became editor of the organization's community newspaper, The Firing Line. JOIN worked to obtain jobs or welfare for residents by protesting at the local welfare office and providing adult educational programs. JOIN also criticized the use of police brutality and opposed Mayor Richard Daley's urban renewal plans that threatened to displace many Uptown residents. It was around this time that Peggy and Gil Terry split up and Peggy and her children moved Uptown. When the SDS withdrew funding from JOIN in 1967, Terry operated the organization out of her home.
While involved with JOIN, Terry also participated in other social action organizations. In her opposition to the Vietnam War, she became both a member of the Chicago Council for Peace and Voters for Peace. She attended Voters for Peace events and assisted peace candidate John J. Walsh during his campaign for alderman in the 40th district. Terry also advocated for the political rights of Appalachian coal miners through her participation in the Appalachian People's Congress. Convened by the Congress of Appalachian Development, the group endeavored to help residents of Appalachia exercise their political rights.
In 1968 Terry sat on the steering committee for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Poor People's Campaign. Headed by Reverend Ralph Abernathy after Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, the campaign aimed to both expose the conditions that poor Americans of all races lived in and obtain assistance for these people in the form of jobs. On the participants' way to Washington, D.C., Terry spoke before a mass meeting of 3,000 people held at John Welsey AME Church in Columbus, Ohio.
Also in 1968, Terry ran for Vice President on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket with Eldridge Cleaver as the Presidential candidate. As a result of Cleaver's imprisonment, Terry campaigned alone across the country. Her platform included the need for schools to educate children rather than train them for the needs of big business, increasing the taxes on corporations while reducing working people's taxes, and ending the draft and the Vietnam War. Terry never believed they would win, but utilized her campaign to recruit young poor whites' participation in JOIN, which was renamed the National Organizing Committee in 1968.
After the election, Terry returned to Chicago to continue her work as an activist. In the mid 1970s, she appeared on Chicago journalist and broadcaster Studs Terkel's radio show to promote the need to help poor Southern whites both in Uptown and Appalachia. Around this time, the National Organizing Committee was dissolved and Terry began to experience health problems. Despite deteriorating health, she continued her social activism. She wrote to politicians and monitored the work of local organizers. She supported designating January 15th Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in honor of his sacrifice. In the 1980s, she advocated for the end of the nuclear arms race. After years of poor health, Terry died in Chicago in 2004.
