A Voice from the South: Dr. Anna Julia Cooper

“No profounder duty confronts a state than the necessity of constructing sane and serviceable citizens out of the material of childhood. No higher privilege awaits the individual in this land of opportunity than the privilege of contributing to such an end.”

Dr. Anna Julia Cooper wrote these words ca. 1930 in her essay, “Educational Programs”. (Cooper, Portable, 190.)  Her life as a civil rights activist, essayist, an educator, an intellectual, and a philosopher on society and the law is an extraordinary catalog of outstanding achievements.

Born in 1858 into slavery to Hannah Stanley Haywood in Raleigh, North Carolina, Anna Julia Haywood was freed in 1863, following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. She enrolled in Saint Augustine Normal School and Collegiate Institute as a student, a school established by the Freedman’s Bureau, and began tutoring there at age 10 to help with her tuition. She married fellow student George A.C. Cooper when she graduated from high school. He died two years later, and she enrolled in Oberlin College in 1881, which she attended on scholarship. While there, she asked to attend the “gentlemen’s courses” which included higher mathematics, Latin, and Greek. (Cooper, Portable, xxiii.) She graduated from Oberlin with a B.A. in mathematics in 1884, and an M.A. in mathematics  in 1887.

Cooper started teaching math and science at the M Street School, in Washington, D.C., after earning her M.A. from Oberlin. The school “provided a rigorous curriculum that surpassed the offerings of many white schools.” M Street offered a curriculum with academic, scientific, technical, and business tracks. Cooper published her book, A Voice from the South to a positive critical response. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes of the essay “Woman vs. the Indian”, “Cooper… calls for the natural inherent rights of all people, or ‘the rights of humanity’ but also specifying groups typically denied these rights such as Blacks, women, Indians (or Native Americans), and the poor.” This comment on her philosophy of inherent rights applies not only to the essay, but to much of the book. Her thoughts and essays on society’s influence on the law, racial prejudice, feminism and education were followed by her more famous peers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she corresponded with often.

She traveled to conferences and cultural exchange programs, traveled to Nassau and throughout Europe, and spoke at the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, where she was a member of the Executive Committee (Cooper, Portable, xl.) She was promoted to principal of the M Street School in 1901. While directing the school as the principal, she made academic and vocational tracks available to all students. However, she focused on strengthening the school’s curriculum on academics, “an approach often associated with Du Bois’s educational philosophy rather than Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on vocational training.” As principal, she made successful efforts to get students admitted to Brown, Mt. Holyoke, Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools when the students passed entrance examinations.  She was removed from her position as principal by the head of the school board, who disapproved of her focus of the school curriculum on academics, despite community support for her to stay. She moved to teach at the Jefferson Institute in Missouri for a brief period while pursuing legal action for a return to her position at M Street and back pay. Her commitment to equal education predated Brown v. Board of Education.

Eventually, Cooper returned to M Street School in 1910 to teach Latin, and continued her own studies, while adopting the five grandchildren of her brother. She published her translation of Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne in 1917. At the age of 66, she completed and defended her doctoral thesis, L’Attitude de la France à l’Egard l’Esclavage Pendant la Révolution at the Sorbonne; she was the first African-American woman to graduate from the school.

Dr. Cooper returned to teaching at M Street School until 1930 when she retired. She became the president of Frelinghuysen University, the only other higher education facility for African Americans in D.C. at the time. When the school had insufficient funds to stay in operation, she ran it from her own home, while continuing to write and publish essays in The Crisis and the Washington Tribune.

She worked and advocated throughout her career for equal rights in education and society for women and African Americans until her death at 105. Like some other civil rights activists we have featured in the blog in the past, she was not a lawyer, but her philosophical writing and educational work created changes in civil rights; the Library’s unique collections of her work allow readers to discover more. Her writing is printed in the U.S. passport, “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

Sources

• E185.86 .C5868 2022 Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia). The Portable Anna Julia Cooper.
• E185.86 .C5874 1998 Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia). The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper : including A Voice from the South and other important essays, papers, and letters / edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan.
• E185 .Z9 box 4, no. 25 Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia). Equality of races and the democratic movement = Les ideés egalitaires et le mouvement democratique.
• F1923.C7213 1988 Cooper, Anna J. Slavery and the French revolutionists (1788-1805) / translated with a foreword and introductory essay by Frances Richardson Keller.
• E185.86.M3635 2019  Many Strides to Freedom : African American Women’s Unsung Contributions and Legacies / Janelle Carter-Robinson, editor.
• E185.A25363 2021 African American political thought : a collected history / edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner.

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