August 10, 1858 – Birth of Anna Julia Cooper, Prominent African-American Scholar & Activist

Anna Julia Cooper nee Haywood was born on this day in history in North Carolina to an enslaved mother and her white master. She spent her lifetime fighting the restrictions of race and gender, eventually becoming only the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She is sometimes called “the mother of Black Feminism.”

At age nine, Anna entered the St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (now St. Augustine’s University), initially opened as a school for former slaves. She petitioned the school to take classes designated for boys, and later at Oberlin College also eschewed the “ladies course” in favor of the “gentleman’s course.” (At St. Augustine’s, Anna met the man she would marry, George A.C. Cooper. He died however after only two years of marriage.) Anna received a B.A. in 1884, and a masters degree in mathematics in 1887. She was then recruited to teach at the Washington Colored High School, or M Street School, the only all-black school in Washington, D.C.

Public domain image taken from the scan of Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book A Voice from the South

As a history of Anna on the website for The Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South reports:

Describing her own vocation as ‘the education of neglected people,’ Cooper saw education, and specifically higher education, as the means of black women’s advancement. She believed ‘that intellectual development, with the self-reliance and capacity for earning a livelihood which it gives,’ would supersede any need for dependence on men, allowing women to extend their horizons and have their ‘sympathies… broadened and deepened and multiplied.’”

During her time at the school, where she was eventually promoted to principal, she also became involved in helping black women beyond the area of education. She founded the Color Women’s League of Washington in 1892, and seven years later helped open the first YWCA chapter for black women. She spoke at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, and delivered a paper at the first Pan-African Conference in London, England, in 1900.

Cooper believed that black women’s subjection to intersecting oppressions gave them a unique and invaluable outlook on society, arguing that rather than being suppressed, it was the voices of these women that needed to be front and center as society moved forward.

Cooper not only returned to school to acquire a Ph.D. in 1925, but did so while raising five children whom she had adopted.

Cooper retired from M Street School in 1930 to take the position of president at Frelinghuysen University, a school founded to provide classes for D.C. residents lacking access to higher education. She worked for Frelinghuysen for twenty years, first as president and then as registrar, staying until she was 95.

On February 27, 1964, Cooper died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 105. Her memorial was held in a chapel on the campus of Saint Augustine’s College, in Raleigh, NC, where her academic career began. She was buried alongside her husband at the City Cemetery in Raleigh.