Anna Julia Cooper

A renowned educator, author, activist, and scholar, Anna Julia (Haywood) Cooper (b. 1858–d. 1964) was born into slavery on 10 August in Raleigh, North Carolina, to mother, Hannah Stanley, who was enslaved to Cooper’s white father, presumably George Washington Haywood. Cooper lived 105 years, made profound contributions to Black social and political organizing, intellectual and literary history, educational theory and praxis, and Black feminist thought. From 1868 to 1877 Cooper attended St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, earning her high school diploma in 1877. That same year she married George A. C. Cooper, who died just two years later. Cooper never remarried, but she supported, at various stages in her life, at least two foster and five adopted children. Cooper earned a BA (1884) and MA (1887) both in Mathematics at Oberlin College before being recruited, in 1887, to teach at the prestigious Washington Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (or “M Street” as it was known, and renamed Dunbar High School in 1916) in Washington, DC. Throughout the 1890s Cooper rose to prominence as a celebrated author, educator, orator, scholar, and community activist, addressing audiences at numerous national and international conferences and conventions. She also worked with or helped found several community organizations, including the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, the Washington Negro Folklore Society, and the Colored Settlement House, and she served as an editor for The Southland magazine and interim editor for the “Folklore and Ethnology Column” of The Southern Workman. During this time, Cooper published the work she is most known for: her 1892 collection of speeches and essays, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South in which she delivered an incisive critique of white supremacist patriarchal power and argued for an intersectional, situated analysis of the operations of race, gender, and class. In 1901 Cooper was promoted to principal of M Street High School, a position she held until the Washington, DC, school board failed to reappoint her for refusing to teach the inferior “colored” curriculum. She spent from 1906 to 1911 teaching at Lincoln Institute in Missouri before returning to M Street where she taught until her retirement in 1930. During this time, Cooper studied at La Guilde Internationale, Paris, and enrolled from 1914 to 1917 in graduate studies at Columbia University. At sixty-six years of age, she earned her PhD from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, making her the fourth African American woman to earn a PhD and perhaps the first to do so in the field of history. In 1930 Cooper assumed the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, a collection of community schools for African American adult learners, and remained active with the school until at least 1950. Cooper continued to write and publish well into the mid-twentieth century, publishing in Paris both her translation of Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne and her dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la Révolution, contributing two essays to The Crisis and editing and privately printing Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (1951). Through efforts led largely by Black feminist scholars, Cooper is now regarded as one of the most important Black women intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper died in Washington, DC, on 27 February 1964 at the age of 105.