There may be lingering doubts about whether the expression “the real McCoy” might be attributed to Black inventor Elijah McCoy. However, it is incontrovertibly true that he was married to Mary Eleanora McCoy, who established recognition of her own in women’s clubs and the early Civil Rights Movement, particularly in Michigan.
Michigan historian Dr. DeWitt Dykes has crafted a lengthy exposition of her life in Darlene Clark Hine’s “Black Women in America—An Historical Encyclopedia.” He wrote that she “rose from humble beginnings to become a person of great influence in social improvement and philanthropic clubs and organizations in Michigan.”
Born Mary Eleanor Delaney on Jan. 26, 1846, in Lawrenceburg, Ind., in an Underground Railroad station. She was the child of an enslaved mother and father.
Her formal education, according to Dykes, consisted mainly of attending classes at mission schools and in private homes. Later, there were lessons derived from Freedom Schools in St. Louis, Mo., in 1860. She married Elijah in 1872, becoming his second wife. By the 1880s, she was living in Detroit, where her husband set up shop and began a long line of inventions. While he tinkered away, Mary was an active member of several women’s clubs.
Her activism was such that she was soon deemed the “Mother of Clubs.” In 1895, she was among the founders of the Inasmuch Circle of King’s Daughters and Sons Clubs, which was often cited as the first of its kind in Michigan. When the Twentieth Century Club began in 1894, Mary was the first Black charter member. Four years later, she was one of the co-founders of the Michigan State Association of Colored Women and during the same year, called the first meeting of the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Women in Detroit, serving as its vice president.
She was also a major financial supporter of the McCoy Home for Colored Children. Working in association with the indefatigable Lucy Thurman, Mary helped to organize a chapter of the National Association of Colored Women, in effect, the state’s associate branch of the group. She was formidable in the creation of the Sojourner Truth Memorial Association, which provided college scholarships to children of the formerly enslaved.
An extension of all her endeavors arrived with the wave of activity in women’s suffrage, and she became involved in the movement. In 1913, she marched in the Woman Suffrage Parade in the nation’s capital and seven years later, attended the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s Victory Convention in Chicago.
In 1920, the McCoys were involved in a traffic accident that left Mary seriously injured. As a result, her health rapidly declined. She died on November 17, 1923, in Detroit and is buried in Ypsilanti, Mich.
In 2012, she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame and four years later, the Mary E. McCoy Post Office Building on E. Jefferson Street was dedicated in Detroit. Rep. Brenda Lawrence introduced the legislation to rename the building.