Coppin, Fanny Jackson

Impact on the world

Appointed principal of Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth in 1869, becoming the first African American woman in the country to hold that position, and later promoted to superintendent, making her the first African American superintendent of any school district in the United States; over 37 years leading the Institute, she introduced a formal practice-teaching system and, after a decade-long personal campaign, established a vocational training department offering instruction in ten different trades, viewing practical skills training as equally vital to academic education in the fight against racial discrimination.

Life & background

Born into slavery, Jackson's freedom was purchased by her aunt for $125 when she was 12 years old, after which she worked as a domestic servant in Rhode Island for author George Henry Calvert, using her modest earnings to hire a private tutor for three hours of study each week. With scholarship support, she enrolled in 1860 at Oberlin College, the first American college to admit both Black and female students, switching from the easier 'ladies' course' to the more demanding 'gentlemen's course' and becoming the first Black instructor in Oberlin's own preparatory department before graduating in 1865 and joining Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, now Cheyney University. Appointed head principal in 1869 after the previous principal's departure, becoming the first Black woman in the nation to hold such a title, she spent the next 37 years transforming the school, introducing a formal practice-teaching system in 1878 and, after a ten-year advocacy campaign, finally opening an industrial training department in 1889 offering instruction in ten trades, alongside founding a Women's Industrial Exchange showcasing her female students' work and a residential home for working women new to the city. In a letter to Frederick Douglass, she described her sense of having been entrusted with a sacred responsibility to lift her race out of ignorance and see it crowned with dignity and intellectual achievement; in 1893 she joined fellow educators including Anna Julia Cooper as one of five Black women invited to address the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. After marrying AME minister Levi Jenkins Coppin in 1881, she resigned from the Institute in 1902 to join her husband on a decade-long missionary assignment in Cape Town, South Africa, founding the Bethel Institute there before declining health forced her return to Philadelphia, where she died in 1913; Baltimore's Coppin State University, founded as a teacher training school named in her honor in 1926, continues to bear her name today.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org; Social Networks and Archival Context; Kiddle Encyclopedia