Anna J. Cooper

Anna Julia Cooper: Born Enslaved, Doctor of the Sorbonne

She was sixty-six years old, raising five adopted children, working full-time in a Washington high school, and she defended her doctoral thesis in French at the University of Paris. The subject was the attitude of France toward slavery between 1789 and 1848 — a question she was uniquely positioned to press, having been born into American slavery herself. Anna Julia Cooper's life ran from the year before John Brown's raid to the year after the March on Washington, and she spent almost all of it insisting that the education of Black women was not a charity but the hinge on which everything else turned.

Raleigh, 1858

Cooper was born Anna Julia Haywood in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 10 August 1858, enslaved along with her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, by George Washington Haywood. Either Haywood or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, was almost certainly her father; her mother would never say. She had two older brothers, Andrew and Rufus, also enslaved.

Emancipation came when she was nine, and with it a scholarship to Saint Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, newly founded by the Episcopal diocese. She stayed fourteen years. From the beginning she made trouble in the most productive way available to her: the school reserved its classical curriculum for men preparing for the ministry, and Cooper simply demanded access to it, taking Latin, Greek, French, mathematics and science. It was a pattern. Every barrier she encountered she treated as an administrative error to be corrected rather than a fact to be accommodated.

In 1877 she married George A. C. Cooper, a fellow teacher at the institute. He died two years later, leaving her a widow at twenty-one. Under the conventions of the time, a married woman's education ended at the altar; his death, brutally, restored her freedom to study. She never remarried.

Oberlin and the Mathematics Degree

Cooper entered Oberlin College as a sophomore and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1884, again insisting on the gentlemen's course rather than the shortened programme offered to women. Oberlin awarded her a master's degree in mathematics in 1888, making her one of the first two African American women to hold one. Between and around these degrees she taught — at Saint Augustine's, at Wilberforce University, and then in Washington, D.C.

A Voice from the South

In 1892 she published *A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South*, a collection of essays now generally recognized as the first major work of Black feminist theory and the reason she is called the mother of Black feminism. The book's argument runs against both of the reform movements of its day. To white suffragists, Cooper pointed out that a women's movement that ignored race spoke for only some women. To Black male leaders, she argued that the moral, spiritual and educational advancement of Black women would determine the standing of the whole community — that no race rises higher than its women, and that no one could speak for the Black woman except the Black woman herself.

Her essay on the higher education of women, published in 1890–91, made the case for classical education for Black women nearly a decade before Du Bois's better-known intervention on the same terrain. Her sentences have a compressed, aphoristic force: "A nation's greatness is not dependent upon the things it make and uses," she said in a 1902 speech. "Things without thots are mere vulgarities."

The M Street Principal

Cooper joined M Street High School in Washington, D.C., teaching Latin, mathematics and science, and became its principal in 1901 or 1902. Under her the school sent graduates to Harvard, Yale, Brown and Oberlin — proof of the classical, college-preparatory model she championed and that Booker T. Washington's vocational programme was designed to displace. The success made her enemies. In 1906 the District school board refused to reappoint her, in a decision that belonged to the wider white backlash against the gains of Reconstruction. She went to Missouri to teach, and was later recalled to M Street, where she taught while conducting doctoral research.

She was not confined to a classroom. In 1892 she helped found the Colored Women's League in Washington alongside Helen Appo Cook, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Church Terrell and others. In 1893 she gave an address at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, one of only five African American women invited to speak. In 1900 she attended the First Pan-African Conference in London, then travelled through Scotland, Paris, Munich and Italy.

The Doctorate and Frelinghuysen

She began doctoral study at Columbia in 1914, then interrupted it in 1915 to adopt the five orphaned children of her late half-brother. She transferred to the University of Paris and spent a decade grinding out the degree in the margins of a full teaching load and a full household, completing coursework by 1924 and defending "The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848" in 1925. She was the fourth African American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate.

Retiring from teaching in 1930, she took the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, an institution serving working-class Black Washingtonians who could not otherwise reach higher education. When the mortgage became impossible, she moved the university into her own house in LeDroit Park. She stepped down as president in 1940 and stayed on as registrar.

Why Anna Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on two things. The first is analytical priority: writing in 1892, Cooper articulated the double bind of race and sex — the position of a person for whom neither the race movement nor the women's movement was designed — with a clarity that anticipated by nearly a century the framework now called intersectionality. That is not a matter of being early to a fashionable idea; it required constructing a critique of two allied movements simultaneously, from a position of no institutional power whatsoever. The second is sheer intellectual range and stamina: a classicist and mathematician who took a Sorbonne doctorate in French history at sixty-six, while raising five children and running a school.

The honest qualification is that Cooper was not, and did not try to be, a systematic theorist. *A Voice from the South* is a collection of essays, oratorical in register, argued by moral force and example rather than by evidence or formal argument; she built no method and trained no school of successors. Her contemporary reputation was as an educator, and much of her current standing comes from a recovery of her work by scholars in the 1980s and after. Her genius is best described as moral and rhetorical intelligence of unusual precision — an ability to name a structural position that nobody else had named — combined with a practical, institution-building doggedness that is rarer than either.

Legacy

Cooper died in Washington on 27 February 1964, aged 105. Her memorial was held in the chapel of Saint Augustine's, where she had begun at nine. A Wake Forest research centre, a Spelman professorship, an Episcopal school in Richmond, a 2009 postage stamp and a commemoration in the Episcopal Church's calendar all carry her name. So does the United States passport, which since 2016 has printed her line: "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."

Achievements

• Held posts at Wilberforce University, St. Augustine's University and M Street High School