Anna Julia Cooper was a visionary Black feminist leader, educator, intellectual, and activist. She was born Anna Julia Haywood, into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina on August 10th 1858 and was the youngest of three children. Anna’s mother was Hannah Stanley, a slave owned by George Washington Haywood, an attorney from Raleigh, who was most likely Anna’s father. After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and the Civil War ended, Cooper followed the path of many Blacks as she grasped hold of opportunities for an education through the Freedmen’s Bureau. She was a top student. At age nine, Anna's education officially began. Cooper enrolled in the newly opened St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, N.C, which focused on educating and training teachers to educate former slave families. The educational levels offered at St. Augustine ranged from primary to high school, including trade-skill training.
At St. Augustine’s, Cooper fought for her right to take courses, such as Greek, which were reserved for men by demonstrating her scholastic ability. For Anna, this allowed her to do the intellectual work that few other Black women had the opportunity to do. While at St. Augustine she married in 1877 at the tender age of nineteen, George Christopher Cooper, whose was a theological student and teacher of Greek. He died just two years later, and she never remarried, but supported, at various stages in her life, at least two foster and five adopted children. During her 14 years at St. Augustine's, she distinguished herself as a bright and ambitious student who showed equal promise in both liberal arts and analytical disciplines such as mathematics and science.
Following her husband’s passing, Anna Julia Cooper continued to teach at St. Augustine’s until 1881, when she enrolled at Oberlin College, in Ohio, along with a small group of other Black educators and leaders. Among her classmates was Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs (later Hunt). At Oberlin, she had to protest to be allowed into the “Gentlemen’s classes” but she persevered and earned her BA and MA in Mathematics. Anna refused to stand by and allow the privilege afforded the men at Oberlin to result in the oppression of her education. In the 1883–1884 school year, she taught classics, modern history, higher English, and vocal and instrumental music. Cooper's academic excellence enabled her to work as a tutor for younger children, which also helped her pay for her educational expenses.
In 1884 she graduated with a degree in mathematics, becoming one of the first African-American women to graduate from the school. Cooper returned to Raleigh and taught math, Greek, and Latin at St. Augustine’s until 1887. Cooper was recruited for a job teaching in Washington, DC. She began as a teacher at M Street. M Street was the most prestigious secondary school for African Americans in the country, and was later renamed Dunbar High School. Cooper taught at Dunbar for four decades. She spent five years as the principal of Dunbar, waging a “courageous revolt” against inferior curriculum for African American students.
Anna, then went back to Oberlin and earned an M.A. in mathematics in 1888, making her one of the first two Black women – along with Mary Church Terrell, who received her M.A. in the same year - to earn a master's degree. From the mid-1880s through the turn into the twentieth century, as White politicians and publics abandoned Reconstruction reforms, she crisscrossed the nation. She traveled the world exposing this betrayal and advocating for Black rights and equality. In 1886, Anna spoke before the Protestant Episcopal Church’s colored clergy in Washington, D.C. Her topic was “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race." She criticizes the Episcopal Church for neglecting the education of Black women, and argues that this is one reason why the Church had struggled to recruit large numbers of African Americans. In her speech, Anna uses religious language and Christian principles to make her argument.
During the 1890s Cooper became involved in the Black women’s club movement. Women’s club members were generally educated middle-class women who believed that it was their duty to help less-fortunate African Americans. In 1892, Cooper published "A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South", the first book-length volume of Black feminist analysis in the United States. Written in a moment of social and political backlash, Cooper provided a “clear-eyed” commentary on a nation faced with the failures of Reconstruction. Cooper explored a variety of topics including race relations, poverty, and gender inequality.
The book has two parts: "The Colored Women’s Office and Race and Culture". In the first half, Cooper focuses on the hitherto voiceless Black women. In the second half, she addresses race and culture more broadly. She encouraged the African American community to take advantage of education. In the text, she addressed the prejudice of the White women’s suffrage movement, and the vital, but erased, contributions of African Americans to American culture, society, and wealth. Well received by Black and White critics alike, the collection was regarded as “one of the most readable books on the race question of the South.” A Voice from the South is significant in many ways. It is the only book published by one of the most prominent Black female intellectuals of the era.
During the 1890s Cooper became involved in the Black women’s club movement. Women’s club members were generally educated middle-class women who believed that it was their duty to help less-fortunate African Americans. During that time Cooper became a popular public speaker. Through her work Cooper, both indirectly and directly, engaged in debates with the great “race men” of her time like W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany and female activists such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Cooper and other Black women across the nation began to create clubs and associations in the late 19th century that were dedicated to the interests and well-being of the African-American community.
In Washington, D.C., Cooper helped establish local organizations for women, young people, and the poor that addressed a range of issues including education, housing, and unemployment. Anna also used public speaking as a platform for change. In 1893, she spoke about the needs of African-American women at the Chicago World’s Fair. She was one of only two African-American women to address the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, where she presented on the "Negro Problem in America.". After visiting the cathedral towns of Scotland and England, she went to Paris for the World Exposition.
In 1902, Cooper became principal of the M Street High School and immediately worked to strengthen the curriculum, which stressed both liberal arts and vocational training. Refusing to use inferior textbooks, Cooper sought to better prepare students for admission to some of the nation’s top colleges and universities, including the Ivy League. Her curriculum, which involved college prep for the students, ran afoul of the D.C. school board’s thinking. Cooper’s controversial emphasis on college preparatory courses irked critics (such as Booker T. Washington) who favored vocational education, industrial education and skilled manual labor for African Americans. Using trumped-up charges, the D.C's Board of Education refused to renew her contract for the 1905–06 school year.
Cooper educated her students so well that they could not be denied, although this did not help her tenure. Using trumped-up charges, the District of Columbia Board of Education refused to renew her contract for the 1905–06 school year. Anna experienced profound isolation at times in her life, and atrocious indignities at the hands of the White board members while she was principal. After leaving M Street High School, Anna left Washington, D.C., and began her work at the Jefferson Institute in Missouri where she also supervised the Colored Social Settlement. Anna remained there until 1913 when she decided to pursue her PhD. She enrolled as a part time student to work on her doctorate at Columbia University in New York in 1914, at age 56, while taking care of her brother’s five children.
In 1924, Cooper took a leave of absence from the M Street School with the intent to study in residency at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, in France. She was recalled to M Street school after a few months. The University of Paris-Sorbonne was understanding and allowed her to return home to work on her thesis. The following year, she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, which explored the attitudes of the French toward slavery during the late-18th-century revolutions in France and Haiti. She was only the fourth Black woman in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. and the first Black woman from any country to do so at the Sorbonne. Cooper retired from teaching at Dunbar High School in 1930, but continued to give lectures, publish essays, and be active in community affairs.
During this time, she also served as president of Frelinghuysen University, which offered affordable liberal arts and professional courses for working African Americans in Washington, D.C. Cooper championed a holistic approach to learning that went beyond mere vocational and manual labor training. Anna Julia Cooper retired from her role as president in 1940 but continued to serve Frelinghuysen, which was partly located in Cooper’s own home for several years. She privately published her memoir, "The Third Step", around 1945. Cooper was an educator, author, suffragist and activist who fought for social justice and civil rights for African-American women, young and old people, and the poor through her scholarship, community outreach, and innovative educational leadership.
Throughout her life, Cooper remained steadfast in her faith in education as a vehicle for individual and social transformation. She advocated for equal rights for Black people and Black women throughout her life. When Anna was born, the vast majority of African American people in this nation were in chains. When she died in February of 1964, the people of America were in the midst of a collective struggle for civil and human rights and social justice. Anna transcended this time span and left an indelible mark on the history of Black women, education, and the country. She was a life-long learner, educator, scholar, speaker, writer, feminist, and civil rights activist, that embodied the many qualities of a well-educated, flourishing person. Anna Julia Cooper's educational philosophy was deeply rooted in the belief that education is a transformative tool for social change and racial uplift, particularly for African Americans.