Cooper, Anna Julia (Haywood)

Impact on the world

Published 'A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South' in 1892, now regarded as a foundational text of Black feminist thought that earned her the later title 'Mother of Black Feminism,' before earning a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925 at age 67, becoming only the fourth African American woman in U.S. history to hold a PhD; as principal of Washington, D.C.'s M Street High School, she championed rigorous college-preparatory academics for Black students over the era's dominant vocational-training model, sending numerous graduates to Ivy League universities, and she remains, as of recent printings, the only woman of any background quoted in the official U.S. passport.

Life & background

Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of an enslaved woman and likely her white enslaver or his brother, Cooper enrolled at age nine in Saint Augustine's Normal School, a newly founded institution for formerly enslaved people, where she had to fight for the right to take the same rigorous coursework offered to her male classmates, an early experience that shaped her lifelong feminist commitment to Black women's education specifically. Widowed just two years into her marriage, she earned a bachelor's and master's degree in mathematics from Oberlin College before joining the faculty, and later becoming principal, of Washington's M Street High School, where she deliberately pushed back against Booker T. Washington's accommodationist emphasis on vocational training, instead building a college-preparatory curriculum that placed numerous graduates into elite universities; this approach contributed to her eventual, controversial removal as principal amid pressure from school board members who favored the vocational model. She spent decades pursuing her own doctorate while raising two foster children and five of her late half-brother's orphaned grandchildren on a teacher's salary, finally completing her dissertation on French attitudes toward slavery during the Revolution at the Sorbonne in 1925, becoming the fourth African American woman ever to earn a PhD. A prominent voice in the Black women's club movement and a speaker at the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women and the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, she went on to lead Frelinghuysen University, an institution serving working Black adults in Washington, D.C., as its president from 1930 to 1941, continuing to fight, ultimately unsuccessfully even with NAACP appeals, for the school's right to grant bachelor's degrees; she died in her sleep in 1964 at age 105.

Sources

1. Britannica (Anna Julia Cooper); NMAAHC; America Comes Alive; Encyclopedia.com; First Wave Feminisms (UW)