By Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, emerged as one of the most influential Black scholars and activists in American history.
The daughter of Hannah Stanley Haywood and likely the enslaver Fabius J. Haywood, Cooper's early life was marked by the inhumanity of slavery. Following emancipation, she joined countless newly freed African Americans seeking education as a path to freedom and dignity.
She enrolled at Saint Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, where she immediately took a stand against gender inequality. She organized one of the school’s earliest protests, demanding the right to take Latin and Greek courses typically reserved for male students. Her refusal to accept limitations placed on her as a Black woman would become a theme throughout her life.
At Oberlin College, she again faced institutional sexism when she was denied access to "gentlemen’s courses." Undeterred, she petitioned for admission and ultimately succeeded, signaling her early understanding that education was a battleground for liberation.
In 1892, Cooper published her seminal work, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. This collection of essays and speeches argued powerfully that the elevation of Black women would lead to the elevation of the entire race. She directly challenged both racism and sexism, emphasizing that Black women’s experiences offered critical insights into the intertwined “race problem” and “woman question” —a two birds, one stone deal.
Cooper rebuked Black men who ignored the specific burdens Black women bore and criticized White feminists who abandoned Black suffragists after the Civil War. Cooper made clear that justice for one could not come at the expense of another.
One of her most enduring declarations remains:
“Only the black woman can say...when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood...then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”
Cooper was a dynamic organizer, educator, and global citizen. She helped found and lead organizations such as the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., and the Colored Settlement House. She actively participated in the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA and was part of the executive committee for the First Pan-African Conference in 1900. Her international travels took her from London to Paris, Germany, and Italy, connecting Black struggles in the U.S. with global movements for justice.
In 1902, she became principal of M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., where she championed rigorous academic standards and rejected the vocational-focused "accommodationist" philosophy popularized by Booker T. Washington. Under her leadership, students gained access to Ivy League and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Later, she taught at the Lincoln Institute in Missouri before returning to M Street. In 1925, at the age of 66, she became the fourth Black woman in U.S. history to earn a Ph.D., obtaining her doctorate from the University of Paris, Sorbonne—a staggering achievement for any person of her time, let alone a formerly enslaved Black woman.
Even after retiring from Dunbar High School in 1930, Cooper continued her life's mission by becoming president of Frelinghuysen University, a Washington, D.C.-based institution that offered continuing education to working-class Black adults. When the D.C. Board of Education refused to grant the school degree-granting status, she appealed to the NAACP, which denied her request. Nevertheless, she persisted.
Although contemporaries like W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass received widespread recognition, many of Cooper’s ideas either preceded or paralleled theirs. Her writings on racial identity, double consciousness, and cultural critique offered foundational insights that would later be echoed by more prominently remembered intellectuals—sometimes without proper attribution.
Throughout her life, she corresponded with Du Bois in over thirty letters and produced a body of unpublished poetry, journalism, and dramatic work. She died in 1964 at the age of 105, having witnessed more than a century of American transformation.
In 2009, the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School was founded in Richmond, Virginia, to honor her legacy; tuition-free and serving middle school students in underserved communities.
Cooper remains the only African American woman quoted in the United States passport. Her words grace pages 24 and 25 of the 2016 edition:
"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."
