Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper became one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of her century. Her 1892 book A Voice from the South argued that the progress of Black America could be measured only by the condition of Black women, an argument now read as a founding text of Black feminist thought. She spent more than half a century as a teacher and administrator in Washington, D.C., and earned a doctorate from the University of Paris at the age of 66.
At a Glance
- Born
- 10 August 1858 (some sources give 1859), Raleigh, North Carolina
- Died
- 27 February 1964, Washington, D.C.
- Birth name
- Anna Julia Haywood
- Known for
- A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892); principal of M Street High School (1902–1906); doctorate from the University of Paris (1925)
- HBCU ties
- Saint Augustine's University (Student from 1868 (Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute); later taught there); Wilberforce University (Taught in the 1880s, after graduating from Oberlin); Lincoln University (Missouri) (Taught until 1910)
- Fields
- Education · Literature · Civil Rights
- Era
- Turn of the Century
Early Life
Anna Julia Haywood was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 10 August, most likely in 1858, though some sources give 1859. Her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, was enslaved; Cooper believed her father was her mother’s owner, George Washington Haywood, and wrote that her mother was too modest ever to speak of him. She later described her mother, who could read her Bible and write a little, as the finest woman she had ever known.
In 1868, at about nine years old, she entered Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, an Episcopal school founded in Raleigh after the war to train teachers for the freedpeople. She studied there for years while tutoring younger students, and pressed to be admitted to the Greek classes reserved for young men preparing for the ministry. In 1877 she married George A. G. Cooper, a fellow student and teacher who became an Episcopal clergyman; he died in 1879, and she never remarried.
Widowed at about 21, Cooper applied to Oberlin College in Ohio, listing in her letter the Latin and Greek authors and the mathematics she had already mastered. Admitted in 1881, she earned a B.A. in 1884 and an M.A. in 1887. She taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio and back at Saint Augustine’s before moving to Washington, D.C.
Life and Work
In 1887 Cooper joined the faculty of the Washington Colored High School, soon known as the M Street High School, teaching mathematics, science, and Latin. She boarded for a time with the clergyman and scholar Alexander Crummell, and worked alongside Mary Church Terrell in the city’s Black women’s club movement, helping to organize the Colored Women’s League of Washington in the early 1890s.
In 1892 she published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House), a collection of essays and speeches. Its first half argued for the higher education of women and insisted that Black women, overlooked by both the white women’s movement and Black male leadership, were central to the advancement of the race. Its second half criticized white authors’ portrayals of Black Americans and the racism of the white women’s movement. The book brought her national attention; she spoke at the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and in 1900 attended the first Pan-African Conference in London, where she served on its executive committee.
In 1902 Cooper became principal of M Street High School. She insisted that her students be prepared for college rather than steered only toward industrial training, and under her leadership M Street graduates went on to selective northern colleges. The approach put her at odds with the white-controlled school administration. After charges were brought against her leadership, which historians have linked to hostility toward her academic program, she was not reappointed in 1906. She taught at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, until 1910, when she returned to M Street as a Latin teacher.
Cooper resumed graduate study at Columbia University in the 1910s, but interrupted it to raise five orphaned grandchildren of her late brother, whom she took into her Washington home. She later enrolled at the University of Paris, and in 1925, at 66, she completed a doctorate there with a dissertation in French on France’s attitude toward slavery during the Revolution, later translated as Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists. She is generally counted as the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D.
After retiring from the public schools in 1930, Cooper became president of Frelinghuysen University, a Washington institution offering evening and adult education to Black workers, and led it through the Depression, for a time holding classes in her own home. In her essay “My Racial Philosophy” (1930) and other writings she continued to argue for education that developed the whole person rather than fitting Black students for subordinate labor.
“Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.””
Legacy
Cooper died in Washington on 27 February 1964, at about 105. Her papers are held at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. For decades after her death her work was little read, until scholars of Black women’s history and philosophy recovered A Voice from the South in the 1980s; the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers reissued it in 1988.
She is now studied as a philosopher and historian as well as an educator, and her insistence that race and gender oppression had to be understood together anticipated later Black feminist theory. Her line that only the Black woman could say “when and where I enter” gave the historian Paula Giddings the title of her 1984 history of Black women. On 11 June 2009 the U.S. Postal Service issued a 44-cent stamp in her honor as the thirty-second in its Black Heritage series. Her dissertation, meanwhile, has drawn renewed attention from historians of the Haitian Revolution for its argument that France’s revolutionary ideals were compromised by the colonial economy’s dependence on slavery.
Cooper argued that a people’s progress must be measured by the condition of its women, and she spent her life proving through education that Black women belonged in the highest ranks of learning. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 10 August 1858 Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina (some sources give 1859).
- 1868 Enters Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute.
- 1884 Earns a B.A. from Oberlin College; M.A. follows in 1887.
- 1887 Begins teaching at the Washington Colored High School (M Street).
- 1892 Publishes A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South.
- 1900 Attends the first Pan-African Conference in London.
- 1902–1906 Serves as principal of M Street High School.
- 1925 Receives a doctorate from the University of Paris at 66.
- 1930 Becomes president of Frelinghuysen University.
- 27 February 1964 Dies in Washington, D.C., at about 105.
Sources and Further Reading
- Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House, 1892). Link
- Kathryn Sophia Belle, “Anna Julia Cooper,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015; rev. 2025). Link
- Louise Daniel Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).
- Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, eds., The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
- Tyina Steptoe, “Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (1858–1964),” BlackPast.org. Link
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