Terri Sewell - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Sewell was raised in Selma. Her maternal family offered its homestead to travelers on the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery. Sewell spent her childhood summers in Lowndes County, Alabama with her grandparents. Her grandfather, a Primitive Baptist Minister and a farmer, instilled in her a love for the land, an appreciation of hard work and the importance of her faith. It was her grandfather and the members of Beulah Primitive Baptist Church that gave her a deep understanding of the Black Belt Region of Alabama and its people.

Sewell is the daughter of retired Coach Andrew A. Sewell and former City Councilwoman and retired librarian Nancy Gardner Sewell of Selma, Alabama. Nancy Gardner Sewell was the first black woman elected to the Selma City Council. Both parents held careers in the Selma public school system. Sewell became the first black valedictorian of Selma High School.

Sewell graduated with honors from Princeton University and received a scholarship from U.S. News and World Report, among others. A lifelong Democrat, during the summers while in college, she worked on Capitol Hill for 7th Congressional District congressman Richard Shelby, as well as for then Alabama Senator Howell Heflin. She was a leader on the college campus, serving in various roles including class vice-president, class representative to the Student Union, and spearheading the admission office’s effort to set up a Minority Student Recruitment office to recruit and encourage more minority students to attend the university.

Upon graduation from college, Sewell was featured on NBC’s Today Show as one of the “Top Collegian Women” and was chosen as one of the “Top Ten College Women in America,” by Glamour Magazine. She received the Afro-American Studies Thesis Prize for her senior thesis, "Black Women in Politics: Our Time Has Come", which featured a personal interview with Shirley Chisholm, the first black U.S. Congresswoman. Sewell continued her education, receiving a Masters degree with first-class Honours from Oxford University. At the age of 25, she published her Masters’ thesis on the election of the first black members of British parliament as a book entitled Black Tribunes: Race and Representation in British Politics.

Sewell attended Harvard Law School with the help of an NAACP Legal Defense Fund scholarship, graduating in 1992. In law school, she served as an editor of the Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review and published an article about the legal struggles in Selma in the Harvard Black Letter Journal entitled “Selma, Lord, Selma” (vol. 8, Spring 1991).