People, Locations, Episodes

Anna Julia Cooper, Educator, and Feminist born

Anna Cooper

*On this date in 1858, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born. She was a Black educator and activist.

The daughter of a slave woman and her master, Anne Cooper was from Raleigh, NC. Where she acquired her love for education.  This was from the work environment of her mother’s housemaid place of employment. Cooper attended Barber-Scotia School said that “not far from kindergarten, age” she had decided to be a teacher.

From the St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh to the Sorbonne in Paris, Cooper pursued her dream of over fifty years. In 1877, while at St Augustine’s, she met and eventually married George A. C. Cooper. They worked tirelessly together with many common interests, yet he died two years later.

At twenty-one Cooper was alone; she headed to Oberlin, Ohio in 1881, graduating from Oberlin College in 1884. While there, Cooper began to see herself as a defender of her race and an advocate of Black women. “Not the boys less, but the girls more,” is a phrase she would use time and time again as she addressed critical issues in her conversations, speeches, and writings.  She taught and headed the Modern Languages Department at Wilberforce University, and in 1887, joined the faculty of M street (now Dunbar H. S.) and was principal in 1901.

Cooper was the only woman elected to the esoteric American Negro Academy founded in 1897 and became the fourth Black woman to earn a PhD in 1925. When Frelinghuysen University was founded in Washington D. C. in 1907, it was a nontraditional group of schools to be a beacon of hope for “colored working people,” and Cooper was installed as its second president in 1930.

Anna Cooper was versatile, with well-argued ideas and diversity of thought. Her published works, lectures, poems, and writings demonstrate this best. Tirelessly dedicated she did not stop working until she was eighty-four. Anna Cooper died at 105 on February 27th 1964.

To become a High School Teacher