Person

Dr. Anna Julia Cooper

A woman sits in a chair wearing a long dress with a book on her lap, looking at the viewer
Author, Activist, Educator, and Scholar

Library of Congress

Quick Facts
Significance:
Author, Activist, Educator, and Scholar
Place of Birth:
Raleigh, North Carolina
Date of Birth:
August 10, 1858
Place of Death:
Washington, D.C.
Date of Death:
February 27, 1964
Place of Burial:
Raleigh, North Carolina
Cemetery Name:
City Cemetery

Dr. Anna Julia Cooper once stated, “It isn’t what we say about ourselves, it’s what our lives stand for."1 A pioneer of Black feminist thought, Cooper dedicated her life to public service through her career as a teacher, author, and social activist.

Early Life and Education

Born into slavery on August 10, 1858, Anna Julia Haywood lived in Raleigh, North Carolina with her mother Hannah Stanley (Haywood). Hannah never revealed the identity of the father, presumably her enslaver, to her daughter.

Following emancipation, Anna Julia Haywood began her formal education in 1868 at the St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, a school created with the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau. To attend, Anna received a scholarship from a local reverend. As part of the scholarship, Haywood began to tutor other students in addition to her studies—thus starting her lifelong career as a teacher. She successfully petitioned for admission to all courses at St. Augustine’s, even those previously offered exclusively to boys. She attended the school for 14 years, graduating in 1877.3

While at St. Augustine’s, Haywood met her future husband, George A.C. Cooper. Born in the Bahamas, George taught while also studying theology there. They married in 1877. However, George died in 1879, shortly after becoming ordained.4

Anna J. Cooper continued to teach at St. Augustine’s until 1881, when she enrolled at Oberlin College. As a widow earning her own income through teaching, Cooper wrote to the president of the college asking if she could attend tuition-free. The school granted her admission to the school without cost. She enrolled and continued to teach to support herself.5 She ultimately earned her Bachelor’s degree in 1884 and an honorary Master’s degree in 1887.

Later that same year, Cooper started as a teacher at the M Street Washington High School in Washington, D.C.—the only Black college-preparatory high school.6 While in D.C., Cooper grew more involved with racial politics and social activism. She advocated for Black students to have opportunities for college education, not simply vocational education as Booker T. Washington believed.7

A Voice from the South

In 1892, Cooper wrote the influential book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. With reflections on issues of gender, race, Southern identity, class, labor, and education, it is considered the first book length articulation of Black feminist theory.8 Cooper recognized that “the colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country” where “she is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.”9 Furthermore, she put forth critical ideas about intersectionality:

The cause of freedom is not the cause of race or a sect, a party or a class, — it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.10

A Voice from the South pushed Cooper to the forefront of intellectual debates and racial politics. She spoke at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women, one of only six Black women to do so.11 At the conference, she said:

The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny is evolving.12

Cooper’s Southern voice brought a distinct perspective necessary to understanding the complexities of race and gender across the nation.

Women’s Clubs and Activism

In that same year she published her book, Cooper served as a founding member and the corresponding secretary of the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C. Organized in June 1892 and later incorporated in 1894, Cooper participated alongside other reformers such as Helen Abbo Cook, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Forten Grimké.13 As part of the rising Black women’s club movement, the Colored Women’s League centered racial uplift in efforts towards education and gender equality. They viewed the general “lack of unity and organization” as a key motivator in “promoting the development of a national network of Black women’s clubs.”14

With the largest membership nationally, the League became a critical presence at the First National Conference of Colored Women of America held in Boston at the end of July, 1895. Cooper, one of 53 delegates, read a paper on the “Need of Organization,” on the first day of the conference, stating, “whatever our individual preferences are, the condition of affairs in the United States is such that they require that the colored people organize.”16

The Conference led to the creation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, creating the foundation for the advancement of a national Black women’s club movement. Cooper chaired a committee within the newly established federation to study “the Georgia convict system, Florida state school laws, lynching, and other atrocities.”17 In a recap of the Conference, the Women’s Era reported her as “calm thoughtful, and analytical,- a woman to mould opinion, rather than a leader of men.”18

Cooper grew as an intellectual force into the new century. She traveled to Europe in 1900, where she spoke at the Pan-African Conference in London and participated as the only female member of the American Negro Academy, an organization for African American scholarship.19

Despite her efforts and participation in the national movement, Cooper relentlessly invested her time in her local community through service and teaching. In 1901, she became the principal of the M Street High School, and, a year later, she co-founded the Colored Settlement House in D.C., the first social service agency for African Americans in the city.20 However, in 1906, the Board of Education, full of Booker T. Washington’s supporters, fired her as principal. A controversy grew, emboldened by dissatisfaction with her educational efforts that aligned with Washington’s political opponent, W.E.B. DuBois. As a result, she briefly moved to teach at the Jefferson Institute in Missouri before returning to teach at the M Street High School in D.C. in 1911.21

Becoming Dr. Anna J. Cooper

In 1912, Cooper returned to Europe, finishing her translation of the French text, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne while in Paris. After completing preliminary work for her thesis at Columbia in the summers from 1915-1917, Cooper left again for Europe to complete her Doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the spring of 1925, she successfully defended her doctoral thesis, becoming the fourth Black woman in the United States to earn a PhD.22 Francis Richardson Keller translated her thesis, L’attitude de la France à l’égard l’esclavage pendant larevolution, or Slavery and the French Revolutionists, in 1988.23

Following her PhD, in 1929, Cooper led Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. as its president. When the university needed a permanent site, she offered her home at 201 T St NW free of charge to the school. She even named a school within the University, the “Hannah Stanley Opportunity school,” after her mother.24 When Cooper retired from teaching, she remained active in writing articles and essays for publications such as the Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine founded by W.E.B. DuBois.25

At 105 years old, Anna J. Cooper died in Washington, D.C. on February 27, 1964. She is buried in Raleigh, North Carolina alongside her husband George.26
 

Footnotes

  1.  "Negro Educator Sees Life's Meaning at 100" (2017), Clippings About Anna Julia Cooper, 2, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_clipsabout/2.
  2. Louise Daniel Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution), Archive.org, 3.
  3. Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South, 21-24; Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction, (Routledge, 2012), 15, Google Books.
  4. Ancestry.com, North Carolina, U.S., Marriage Records, 1741-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015, North Carolina, U.S., Marriage Records, 1741-2011 - Ancestry.com; Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South, 29-30.
  5. Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South, 30-39.; Scrapbook No. 1 1881-1926" (2017), Scrapbooks and Albums, 5, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_scrap/2.
  6. Frances Richardson Keller, “An Educational Controversy: Anna Julia Cooper’s Vision of Resolution” NWSA Journal 11, no. 3 (1999): 49–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316681.
  7. Cathryn Bailey, “Anna Julia Cooper: ‘Dedicated in the Name of My Slave Mother to the Education of Colored Working People,’” Hypatia 19, no. 2 (2004), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3811137, 60-61.
  8. Dr. Mia L. Carey, "Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) and 'A Voice from the South,' Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) and "A Voice from the South" (U.S. National Park Service). 
  9. Cooper, A Voice from the South, 134.
  10. This quote has been memorialized in the United States Passport in the 2007 redesign. It is the only quote in the passport from a woman. Cooper, A Voice from the South, 121.
  11. The World’s Congress of Representative Women: a historical resume for popular circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, 1893, Archive.org; Sara C. VanderHaagen,“‘A Grand Sisterhood’: Black American Women Speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107 (1): 1–25; Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction, 21.
  12. The World’s Congress of Representative Women: a historical resume for popular circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, 1893, Archive.org
  13. Colored Woman's League Of Washington, D.C, and Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection. Fourth annual report of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., for the year ending January 1. [Washington, D.C.: Printed by the F.D. Smith Printing Company ..., ?, 1897] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/91898211/.
  14. National Park Service, “Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area,” 114. Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction And The Early Civil Rights Movement In The National Capital Area (nps.gov).
  15. When a Missouri journalist sent a letter attacking Black women to English suffragist and anti-lynching advocate, Florence Balgarnie, Joseph St. Pierre Ruffin called for all clubwomen across the United States to address issues directly affecting Black women. To read more on the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in Boston, see National Park Service, “Shall We Have a Convention…?” https://www.nps.gov/articles/1895-convention.htm.
  16. Women’s Era, August, 1895, p. 3; The Boston Globe, July 30, 1895, 5.
  17. "Historical Records of Conventions of 1895-96 of the Colored Women of America," University of Chicago Library (1902), 9, https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/pdf/ibwells-0009-006.pdf.
  18. Women’s Era, August, 1895, p. 19.
  19. Scrapbook No. 1 1881-1926" (2017), Scrapbooks and Albums, 5, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_scrap/2; Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South, 108-109.
  20. Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction, 11-12; "Negro Educator Sees Life's Meaning at 100" (2017), Clippings About Anna Julia Cooper, 2, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_clipsabout/2.
  21. Scrapbook No. 1 1881-1926" (2017), Scrapbooks and Albums, 5, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_scrap/2; Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South; Charles Lemert, Esme Bhan, Anna Julia Cooper, et al. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other important Essays, Papers, and Letters, (Rowman and Littlefield: 2000), 9-11, Archive.org.
  22. Scrapbook No. 1 1881-1926" (2017), Scrapbooks and Albums, 5, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_scrap/2.
  23. Anna J. Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists (1788-1895), translated by Francis Richardson Keller, Slavery and the French Revolutionists (1788-1805) (archive.org)
  24. Cathryn Bailey, “Anna Julia Cooper: ‘Dedicated in the Name of My Slave Mother to the Education of Colored Working People,’” Hypatia 19, no. 2 (2004), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3811137, 63.; "Negro Educator Sees Life's Meaning at 100" (2017), Clippings About Anna Julia Cooper, 2, https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_clipsabout/2.
  25. Charles Lemert, Esme Bhan, Anna Julia Cooper, et al. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other important Essays, Papers, and Letters, 232. 
  26. “Dr Anna Julia Haywood Cooper,” Find a Grave, Dr Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (1858-1964) - Find a Grave Memorial.

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Last updated: October 22, 2024