Black Feminist Intellectual and Educational Advocate
When asked about Black women historical figures whom I admire, Anna Julia Cooper (nee. Haywood) is always the first to come to mind. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1858, Anna Julia Cooper was a true renaissance woman. She was born into slavery as property of George Washington Haywood, her likely father and the son of state treasurer, John Haywood, who founded the University of North Carolina.
At 9 years old, Cooper received a scholarship to attend St. Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute, a school established by the Episcopal church to educate former slaves, with a focus on training teachers. This was her first experience with education, and she never turned back. Cooper was clearly a gifted and precocious student whose academic talents shone bright in all subjects. She was not satisfied with the school’s track for female students, so she fought to join courses in Greek and Latin that had been reserved for men. She won that fight and an activist was born.
Cooper married a classmate, George Cooper, in 1877, but he died after only 2 years of marriage. They had no children, but she did adopt her late brother’s grandchildren after their mother’s death in 1915.
After her husband’s death, Cooper decided to continue her education. The courses that she fought to take earlier gave her access to a college preparatory curriculum, so she was well prepared when she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio on scholarship as a sophomore. She graduated in 1994 and returned a few years later to earn a masters degree in mathematics in 1888. She and Mary Church Terrell were the first two Black women to earn their M.A.
Early in her career, Cooper established herself as an advocate for the higher education of women. In 1892, she published “The Higher Education of Women,” an essay advocating for educating Black women in classical literature. She made this argument at a time when those Black women who were educated were largely trained as teachers or domestic workers. Cooper was interested in supporting Black women to develop as both pillars of the community and intellectuals. Cooper’s trailblazing spirit was clear in her educational advocacy because she made the case for the education of women more than a decade before W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar case for the education of Black men in The Souls of Black Folk.
In 1900, Cooper traveled to London to participate in the First Pan-African Conference, where she gave a paper titled “The Negro Problem in America.” Cooper made the most of her time in Europe, traveling to Paris for the World Exposition and making stops across Germany and Italy.
Cooper paid for her education by tutoring young children. She remained as a teacher at St. Augustine’s after graduating until she went to Oberlin. She taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio and, later, at Washington Colored High School (later M Street High School) in Washington, DC where she taught Latin, mathematics, and science and eventually became principal. In 1906, the all-white DC School Board forced Cooper to resign as principal because of her public position that Black children should be prepared for higher education and not limited to vocational training. They called her back to teach later.
Cooper published her vision for education in A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South in 1892. Today, this book is held as one of the first articulations of Black feminism. In the book, she argued that, when Black women are educated and make progress in all aspects of life, the entire Black community benefits. She argued for more Black women intellectuals who could counter what she saw as the violent tendencies of men.
Cooper was also a socialite. After moving to Washington, DC in 1892, she joined Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and others in forming the Colored Women’s League, a service organization focused on advocating for the Black community. In 1896, the organization became the National Association of Colored Women. She also formed organizations similar to the YWCA and YMCA to provide support for Black people migrating to Washington, DC from the South, since these organizations would not accept Black members. She was also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
In 1914, Cooper returned to school at Columbia University to begin work on her doctorate. Her studies were interrupted in 1915 when she adopted her brother’s grandchildren, but she transferred to the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924, where she earned the Ph.D. in 1925 with a dissertation titled The Attitude of France on The Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848 that she completed while teaching. Cooper was the 4th Black woman in American history to earn a Ph.D. She was 65 years old.
Cooper retired from teaching in 1930, but her work as a political and educational activist did not stop. She became the president of Frelinghuysen University, a school that provided classes for Washington, DC adult residents who did not have access to higher education. She worked there until it closed when she was 95, moving the school to her home when it could no longer afford its mortgage. She died in 1964 at the age of 105 and is buried beside her husband in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”
