Anna Julia Cooper, The Black Liberation Feminist

“It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.”

In this month’s Amplify, we will explore the life of Anna Julia Cooper, a woman who had a dream to fulfill and an even bigger story to tell. She planted a seed in the minds of many women and helped them grow. Cooper was a Black liberation feminist who advocated for equal educational opportunities for Black people, Black women in particular. She believed in creating a space for Black women to grow and expand their knowledge beyond what society thought they deserved.

To say Anna Julia Cooper lived many lives is an understatement. She spent the first years of her life enslaved. Still, she would become an educator, advocate, Black liberation activist, social science researcher, and voice for many Black women. Born on August 10, 1858, in North Carolina, her mother was Hannah Stanley Haywood, an enslaved woman, while her father was one of the men to which they were enslaved. Historians believe either George Haywood, the man who owned the house where her mother was enslaved, or Dr. Fabius Haywood, in whose house her brother Andrew was enslaved, was her father. Both men were the sons of John Haywood (North Carolina’s longest-serving treasurer). She spent the early years of her life working in the Haywood household. At age nine, she received a scholarship from St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, a school created to develop and educate future teachers for formerly enslaved families.

Historical fact: Cooper attended school in 1867, two years after the American Civil War, when the enslaved were freed.

During her fourteen years at St. Augustine, Cooper excelled in liberal arts, analytic and mathematics, English, Spanish, and French. As a woman and top academic student, Cooper faced sexism and was often forced to limit her future aspirations. She tutored after school to pay for some of her expenses and encouraged the children she tutored to pursue higher education. Like most girls at St. Augustine, Anna Julia Cooper had to follow a “ladies course” track and was discouraged from pursuing anything higher. The school encouraged young men like George Cooper, her future husband, to pursue higher education. She was not deterred by the administrator’s lack of enthusiasm in pursuing higher education. Instead, after graduation, Cooper took her education to another level, teaching classic literature and English at the institution from 1883 to 1884.

In 1877, while still in school, Cooper married George. Unfortunately, George died two years after their marriage. After his death, she continued to teach and pursue her education.

Historical fact: During this time, most women were forced to stop teaching after marriage.

Going the distance and shaping future minds

In 1887, she received a master’s degree in mathematics from Oberlin College in Ohio. She later taught math and science at Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in Washington, DC. Later, she became the school principal, where she implemented more of a college preparatory curriculum, something the school board wasn’t keen on, so in 1906, she resigned. After resigning, she worked at Frelinghuysen University, an adult education school for African Americans; she later served as the university president, expanding the curriculum and implementing courses that allowed students to succeed in various industries. She advocated equality for women, believing that education could limit women’s physical, emotional, and economic dependence on men. Cooper was a huge women’s rights supporter, advocating for the right to vote in her teachings and writings. In 1892, she published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, a book of essays where Cooper emphasized the importance of Black women’s rights, the socioeconomic realities of Black families, and the concept of Black womanhood, including how education benefitted their futures. The book became a catalyst for many Black feminist organizations and movements, earning Cooper the title of “the Mother of Black Feminism.” Cooper did not stop there; as an educator and activist who believed education could change lives, she pursued another degree, adding another “first” to her name.

One of Cooper’s goals was to foster more women intellectuals; this meant working with other activists to achieve that dream. In 1892, Cooper connected Black women activists, one being famed anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, Helen Appo Cook, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Jane Peterson, Mary Church Terrell, and Evelyn Shaw, to create the Colored Women’s League in Washington, DC. The Colored Women’s League was an organization that promoted progress and equality for Black women. The group created courses that included sewing, finance, German, and French, among others, to elevate Black women. The organization claimed the largest membership of any women organization at the time.

As a liberation feminist, Cooper used her life experience to speak and present the importance of Black women in all spaces. In 1900, she presented at the first Pan-African Conference in London, England, with a paper entitled “The Negro Problem in America.” She was one of five Black women chosen to speak at the conference. She used this opportunity to talk about the path of the Black community and its solution. This solution included policy changes to expand equity and provide for Black women.

Even as she expanded her role in political activism and teaching, Cooper wanted to pursue higher education, and in 1911, at fifty-six, she began her doctorate at Columbia University. Unfortunately, in 1915, family tragedy halted her plans, leaving her to care for her brother’s five grandchildren. She moved to Paris in 1924 and enrolled at the Sorbonne for a doctorate, and at sixty-seven, she became the fourth Black woman to receive a PhD in philosophy.

In her later life, Cooper continued publishing books that explored and encouraged other women, especially Black women, to go the distance. She continued working as the president of Frelinghuysen University, working there for twenty years before retiring. Julia Anna Cooper died in 1964 at age 105. She spent her life learning, educating, and wanting to improve the lives of the Black community—especially the lives of Black women. She believed they played a role in all aspects of life; she continued to create spaces for them until her final days.

Why we Amplify

Anna Julia Cooper spent her life creating a safe space for girls to learn; her goal was to make a better world for the next generation, and to educate and develop the minds of future thought leaders.

Cooper believed that “A stream cannot rise higher than its source.”

She wanted other women, particularly Black women, not only to uplift themselves but also to uplift other women. In 2009, a tuition-free private middle school was opened in her honor; the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School is located on the historic Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia. She believed in gender equity, so it’s fitting that there would be an Anna Julia Cooper Center on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South at Wake Forest University, founded by journalist and educational advocate Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry.

As cliché as it may seem, Anna Julia Cooper believed that children are the future, that they deserved to be educated, and that society shouldn’t tie women down to stereotypical notions of what a woman should be. She thought that women had choices, could choose to pursue all that they wanted, and she believed women could go as far as they wanted to. Cooper spent most of her 105 years on this earth trying to create a space for women to learn—physically, emotionally, and financially; we honor her not just for her accomplishments and her many firsts, but because she believed in us, as women, that we deserved to be amplified and not to be bonded by what was deemed as “appropriate for a woman.”

Here’s one last fun fact: Did you know that there are inspirational activists throughout the pages of the US passport, and that Anna Julia Cooper is the only woman quoted in the passport (pages 24–25)?

“The cause of freedom is not the case of a race or a sect or a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

More information about Anna Julia Cooper and other Amplifying Information:

Interested in learning more about activists’ fight for women’s rights? Check out the graphic novel Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall.
Want to learn about Black feminism in the late 1800s? Check out Anna Julia Cooper’s Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, which includes essays and views from Black women from the South.
Here is a list of nineteen Black Feminist Books that you need in your library. I’ve read ten out of nineteen of these books.
Did you know Anna Julia Cooper was a suffragist? Check out Midge Wilson and Kathy Russell’s, Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black Women and White Women, which includes a profile of Cooper and her both fight to include Black Women in the movement, and her fight for women’s right to vote.