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Marching
to a Different Drummer
Unrecognized Heroes of American History
By Robin Kadison Berson Anna
Julia Cooper
(1859?-1964)
Born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina, Anna
Julia Cooper (1859?-1964) achieved extraordinary
academic successes, including earning a Ph.D. from the
Universite de Paris (Sorbonne). Anna's mother, Hannah
Stanley, most likely (Anna believed because of her fair
skin), was the slave mistress of George Washington
Haywood, and was thus Anna's father. Hannah's master,
according to Berson, was Dr. Fabius Haywood. Berson also
differs with others over the year Anna entered St.
Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute,
operated by the Episcopal Church.
According to Berson, St. Augustine opened its doors in 1868.
If that is so, Anna could not have entered school at seven years
old if she was indeed born in 1858 or 1859. Berson's view is
that Anna won a scholarship and entered the school at ten years
old and remained at the school in various capacities, initially
after a year as a pupil teacher, for fourteen years. It was also
at St. Augustine that Anna met her future husband. Berson
explained the meeting as follows:
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In 1874, when she received
special permission to attend the Greek class offered to
theology students, Anna met George Cooper, a West Indian
who was studying to become a minister. When she
completed her courses at St. Augustine's in 1977, the
two were married; they stayed at the school, where both
become teachers. barely two years later George Cooper
died suddenly. At the age of twenty-one, Anna Cooper
became a widow. In her first grief, she clung to the
security of St. Augustine's, where she continued
teaching.
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Anna never remarried.
With a solid background in Greek, Latin, and upper math, Anna
won easily admittance into Oberlin College in Ohio, located near
Lake Erie. One of the first integrated secondary schools in the
country, Oberlin, founded by abolitionist and free thinkers, was
the first college to admit both blacks and women. Anna was
exceedingly prepared for the rigor of Oberlin. According to
Berson,
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in addition to English
grammar and literature, algebra, and geometry, she had
read Ceasar, Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero in Latin and
Xenophon, Plato, Herodotus, and Thucydides in Greek.
Oberlin accepted Cooper with sophomore
standing and a full scholarship. A serious. committed
student, a widow, and several years older than her
classmates, Cooper did not partake much of college
social life. She boarded with a professor Charles
Churchill and his family; they welcomed her with warmth
and genuine affection. Cooper found the Churchill home
stimulating and cultured. She learned from them a
lifelong habit of generosity and hospitality. |
In 1884, Anna received her undergraduate degree
and
then secured a position at Wilberforce University and during the
summer sessions earned an A.M. in mathematics from Oberlin. To
be near her mother and family, Anna in 1885 returned for a year
to St. Augustine. In 1887 she was employed to teach math and
Latin at Washington High School (later named the M Street High
School) in the nation's capital. In 1901, Cooper became principal of M Street High
School.
This
school was was again renamed (1916) to honor African America's first
professional poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Anna spent the next
forty years of her teaching career at the school, making an
impact on the school, the curriculum, and the school's students.
Cooper encouraged many to seek their careers in institutions of
higher education. Her demanding academic success for Negro
students created a backlash among the powers of Washington.
Berson describes the reaction as follows:
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When M Street
graduates began receiving scholarships at schools like
Harvard, Brown, Oberlin, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth,
Radcliffe, and Wilberforce, the Washington Board of
Education took notice. They were furious with Cooper and
her embarrassing ability to defy accepted notions of
blacks' academic limitations; they determined to remove
her from her post. Annette Eaton, an M Street student
during the ensuing crisis, recalled that Cooper's real
"crime" was the level of academic achievement
she expected--and got-- from her students: "It was
pure heresy to think that a colored child could do what
a white child could" (Cooper, xxxiv). The Board of
education charged that Cooper had refused to use a
Board approved textbook; that she was too sympathetic to
weak students; that she was unable to maintain tight
discipline; that she did not have "proper spirit of
unity and loyalty." |
She was relieved as principal in June 1906 and began work as
a language teacher at Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City,
Missouri. According to her biographer, Leona Gabel,
there was also pressure from Tuskegee to drop her. In
1910 she was invited by a new superintendent to return as a
teacher rather than as principal. Between 1910 and 1914,
partially to deal with frustrated aspirations, Cooper spent
three summers studying in Paris as a doctoral student at La
Guilde Internationale.
Her courses fully credited she began study at Columbia
University to receive her doctorate. Having adopted her
brother's orphaned grandchildren, Cooper was unable to meet
Columbia's residency requirement for the doctorate. She
transferred her Columbia credits to the Sorbonne, where with
several summers research and writing she completed her
dissertation, "The Attitude of France on the Question of
Slavery Between 1789 and 1848." Her thesis was defended in
1925.
According to Berson, "At the age of sixty-five, Anna
Julia Cooper became the fourth black woman to receive a Ph.D.
Significantly, all three of the other black woman doctorates
were also associated with the M Street High School; two were
teachers there and one was a graduate." In 1930 Cooper
retired from the M Street School (Dunbar High School) and became
the head of "Frelinghuysen University, a loose conglomerate
of assorted adult evening schools for Washington's working black
population."
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Founded in 1906 by a
former slave, Frelinghausen provided religious classes,
literacy programs, and various skilled trades classes;
its programs were aimed at the city's poorest sector,
but Cooper worked fiercely to elicit understanding and
financial support from the black middle-class. She was
frustrated in this by the Depression. Frelinghausen
spent the 1930s and '40s in a desperate scramble for
funds, and a change in standards cost the school its
accreditation. Frelinghausen, as troubled as it was,
filled a shameful voice in the capital: Of Washington's
seven full-time universities, only Howard accepted
blacks; of eighty part-time or special training schools,
not one enrolled blacks. Cooper was deeply committed to
the mission of Freelinghausen; after the school lost its
building during the depression, she opened her home to
its classes, and she willed her property to the school,
to be used in some way for the education of African
Americans. |
At eighty-three years old Cooper retired
from Frelingshuysen in 1942, but continued to write on topics of interested,
including slavery and education. In 1951 she also completed a work on the
The
Grimke Family. Cooper's most forceful writing was completed in 1892,, entitled
A Voice From the South
by a Black
Woman of the South. It is divided into two parts, "Soprano Obligato" and
"Tutti Ad Libitum" and comprises eight essays.
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There are two recently published texts
that contain the content of Cooper's
A Voice from the
South: a 1998 book, edited by academics
Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan; and a 1990 Oxford publication of the Schomburg
Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers Series,
edited by Henry Louis Gates and Mary Helen Washington.
Both books contains the eight essays, namely, "Our
Raison d'Etre" (1892), "Womanhood: A Vital
Element in the Regeneration and progress of a Race"
(1886), "The Higher Education of Women"
(1890-1891), "Woman Versus The Indian"
(1891-1892), "The Status of Women in America"
(1892) -- all contained in Part 1 (entitled "The
Colored Woman's Office" in Charles Lemert.s book).
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Part Two of Voice from the South (entitled
in Lemert's book "Race and Culture) contains
"Has America A Race Problem? If So, How can It Best
be Solved" (1892), "The Negro as Presented in
American Literature" (1892), "What Are We
Worth" (1892), and "The Gain from a
Belief" (1892).
Lemert's book has two additional essays. His book is
concluded with a third section "The Range of
Cooper's Voice--Feminism, Social Service. Education and
Race Politics." |
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Lemert thus includes Cooper's "The Intellectual progress
of the Colored Woman in the United States Since the Emancipation
Proclamation: A Response to Fannie Barrier Williams"
(1893). This editor also begins the book with his introduction,
entitled "Anna Julia Cooper: The Colored Woman's
Office."
Anna Julia Cooper died in her 105th year in her T Street Home
of an heart attack. Her funeral was held in the chapel at St. Augustine's College in
Raleigh. She was buried next to her husband George Cooper in a
Raleigh cemetery. Her archived papers are housed at Howard
University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
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* Sources:
Cooke, Paul Phillips. "Anna J. Cooper: Educator and
Humanitarian." Negro History Bulletin 45, 1
(January-March, 1982): 5-7. Cooper, Anna Julia.
A Voice
from the South [1892] Introduction by Mary Helen Washington,
New York: Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1988.
Essence, February, 1998, p. 84.
Foner, Philip S. and Robert J. Branham.
Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory,
1787-1900. University of Alabama
Press, 1998.
Giddings, Paula.
When and Where I Enter. New York:
William Morrow, 1984.
Hellerstein, Erna Olafson, et al., eds.
Victorian Women: A
Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth Century
England, France, and the United States. Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1981.
Hutchinson, Louise Daniel.
Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from
the South. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1981.
Library Journal, May 1, 1998, p. 123.
Lina Mainiero, Ungar, ed.
American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from
Colonial Times to the Present, Vol. 1: A to E, 1979.
Loewenberg, Bert, and Ruth Bogin, eds.
Black
Women in Nineteenth Century American Life: Their Words, Their
Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press, 1976.
Sicherman, Barbara and Carol Hurd Green.
Notable American Women: The Modern
Period. Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 1980.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Winter,
1995, pp. 336-356.
Smith, Jessie Carney, ed.
Notable Black
American Women. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.
Terrell, Mary Church. "History of the
High Schools for Negroes in Washington." Journal of Negro History
2 (1917):253-266
www.africanpubs.com/Apps/bios/0040CooperAnna.asp?pic=none
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updated 8 April 2008 |
