Cooper, Anna Julia

Born to a slave woman, Hannah Stanley, and her master, George Washington Haywood, in Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 10, 1858, Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), educator, social activist, and public speaker, grew up in a time when newly freed African [Page 217]American people were deeply involved in national debates about the best forms of education that would serve the needs of Black northern and southern communities. She graduated from St. Augustine Normal School and Collegiate Institute, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1869 and began teaching. She married Reverend George A. C. Cooper, 14 years her senior, in 1877. He passed away after 2 years. She continued her education at Oberlin, Ohio, received an MA in 1887, and taught at Wilberforce, also in Ohio.

Cooper produced her book A Voice From the South by a Black Woman of the South, a collection of speeches and essays, written in 1892. A Voice from the South was the first book length, feminist analysis of the conditions of Africa Americans in the United States. Cooper addressed the unique status of Black women at the intersections of race, gender, and class, arguing that Black women were central in the struggle for racial uplift and must have equitable educational opportunities, including higher education.

Cooper believed that the most useful education for Black children helped them to take their proper place in society. Following that premise, on January 2, 1902, Cooper began serving as the principal of the well-established M Street High School, in Washington, D.C., one of the few high schools in the United States to offer a curriculum that prepared Black students for either industry or college. Under her administration, the school expanded its influence, became a national model for academic preparation, and increased the number of Black students sent to Ivy League colleges.

Cooper strengthened the curriculum in classical subjects and challenged the dominant thinking of the time. Her initiatives dramatically increased the number of students who were accepted to Harvard, Yale, and Brown. Educating Black children, for Cooper, required training the mind and empowering the spirit. She condemned schools that ignored spiritual purposes. For Cooper, education means and ends were justified only when there was meaningful purpose, fostering in students the ability to think, analyze, and act. Following a significant controversy at the M Street School that personally implicated her, she stepped down as head of the school and began teaching at Lincoln University, in Missouri.

In her later years, Cooper was one of a few African Americans to complete a doctorate at the Sorbonne, in Paris. A contemporary of fighters for social justice Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wells-Barnett, and W. E. B. DuBois, Cooper wrote that education was inextricably linked to social justice, asserting that Black people had been forsaken by the federal government. She also became an outspoken leader of social programs and causes for the poor, regularly contributing critical letters and columns to newspapers. In her seventies, Cooper took over the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, a school providing educational opportunities to the working poor in Washington, D.C. Frelinghuysen was eventually closed for lack of funding and programmatic support from the Washington, D.C., School Board.

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