By Barak Epstein, Nima Khomassi, and Gabrielle Ben-Eli

(text copied from http://www.gwu.edu/~e73afram/be-nk-gbe.html)

"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 . . . race enters with me'"

The life of Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) affords rich opportunities for studying the developments in African-American and American life during the century following emancipation. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Cooper's life is framed by especially momentous years in U.S. history: the final years of slavery and the climactic years of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Cooper's eclectic and influential career mirrored the times. Although her life was privileged in relation to those of the majority of African-Americans, Cooper shared in the experiences of wrenching change, elevating promise, and heart-breaking disappointment. She was accordingly able to be an organic and committed intellectual whose eloquent speech was ensnarled in her concern for the future of African-Americans.

Anna Julia Haywood was born into slavery to Hannah Stanley Haywood and her master, George Washington Haywood, in 1858. At the age of nine, she enrolled in St. Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute for free Blacks. Cooper married St. Augustine graduate George Cooper, in 1877. His death in 1879 "ironically allowed her to pursue a career as a teacher, whereas no married woman—black or white—could continue to teach." Cooper received a Bachelor's and a Master's degree from Oberlin College, and was first recruited to teach in 1887. She taught at M Street High School, Washington's only black high school, for many years, and was the subject of public controversy because of her educational philosophy.

In 1915, and in her mid-fifties, Cooper adopted the five orphaned grandchildren of her half-brother. In order to do this, she had to interrupt the doctoral studies that she had undertaken at Columbia University. In 1925, Cooper finally received her doctorate, from the University of Paris, thereby becoming the fourth African-American woman to receive that degree. Cooper's wri ting style changed as her life went on and she was not able to write consistently, but she did continue writing well into her eighties.

Cooper's writings and life expressed her strong social concerns. Indeed, on a college questionnaire in 1932, she wrote that her chief cultural interest was "the education of the underprivileged." This commitment is exhibited beyond her work as an educator and extends to the conscientiousness that infected her scholarship and her social activism.

Development of a Feminist Critique

The first account that Cooper gives of her struggle against sexism is from her teenage years. She relates in "her first and only full-length book", A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South (1892), her protestation to the principal of St. Augustine's concerning the treatment of women in the school. One gets the sense that her strong convictions and deep feelings on the subject commenced to emerge even at that young age:

A boy, however meager his equipment and shallow his pretensions, had only to declare a floating intention to study theology and he could get all the support, encouragement and stimulus he needed, be absolved from work and invested beforehand with all the dignity of his far away office. While a self-supporting girl had to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragements to the higher education.

Cooper's disappointment must certainly have been made more acute by her strong attraction to learning. Her appreciation of the beauty of learning inspired her to attempt writing in a voice that would be expansive enou gh to endure beyond her immediate time and circumstances: such writing is composed "as naturally, as instinctively, as and as irresistibly as a bird sings—with no thought of an audience—singing because it loves to sing,--singing because God, nature, truth sings through it." In Voice from the South, Cooper is able to express her political convictions through this expansive approach. Her skill leaves little doubt that she was largely successful in overcoming the "discouragements" that she had encountered when young, and that these challenges had sharpened her sense of justice. For instance:

It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the black, the brown, and the red,--it is not even the cause of woman vs. man. Nay, 'tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. It would be subversive of every human interest that the cry of one-half the human family be stifled.

Elizabeth Alexander argues that Cooper's style was central to her struggle to find acceptance as an African American female intellectual. Specifically, Cooper's use of the first person lends vividness and immediacy to her work. It also asserts her right to interpret her own : "I ask the men and women who are teachers and co-workers for the highest interests of the race, that they give the girls a chance." (Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought)

Despite overcoming certain sign ificant barriers, Cooper could not escape her social context, and sexism tinged the reception of her work. Even African American men, who also suffered greatly under prevailing social conventions, were not wholly sympathetic to her work. In the same year that Cooper's book was published, Frederick Douglass said that he had "thus far seen no book of importance written by a negro woman and I know of no one among us who can appropriately called famous." In DuBois' On the Damnation of Women, he stands against sexism, but does not address the scholarly work of Black women. In fact, he attributes a particularly powerful passage written Cooper (see top of page) to "one of our women."

The rigidities of gender and racial categoriz ation clearly limited Cooper's opportunities. But due to her determination and inventiveness, those challenges became central to her social activism.

Social Activism

Anna Julia Cooper was a lecturer and organizer. She spoke at the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women as well as the 1900 Pan-African Congress Conference in London. The first person style that can be seen in Cooper's writing is a reflection of her familiarity with the spoken word as a form of political and scholarly communication.

Cooper's communication skills must have served her well in her role as a social organizer. In 1905, she helped found the Colored Women's YWCA. This was part of a national trend of the establi shment of clubs and organizations in which Black women took leadership roles. The leaders of these organizations were activists as well as intellectuals: They worked as teachers, lecturers, social workers, journalists, and in women's clubs. Th ey were more committed to the idea of uplift that to their own personal advancement, partly because they could not isolate themselves from the problems of poor black women.

Specifically, Cooper helped to found the "colored" YWCA in Washington, D.C. in 1912. In part due to the segregationist policies of the white YMCA's, African-American organizations had limited resources. Despite this limitation, the Washington, D.C. YWCA founders and members "built an organization that was the epitome of efficiency, self-reliance, and resourcefulness that was cited as a model for the nation". These challenges to these organizations, as well as their level of determination is dramatically illustrated by the events th at took place during World War I. Then, the YMCA and YWCA sought to deal with the challenge of thousands of African American soldier, sailors, and job-seekers flooding into a town where racial segregation was rife, adequate accommodations few, and opportunities for honest black folks to get into trouble bewilderingly plentiful.

Through experiences such as these, Cooper exhibited a commitment and determination that cannot be questioned. However, she has faced the charge of elitism. It is easy to imagine the fear that Blacks who had gained education and some upward mobility had of being identified with the more heavily oppressed Black poor. The charge against Cooper is based on passages such as this one: "Colored women of education and culture know that . . . the call of duty . . . policy and preservation demand that they go down among the lowly, the illiterate, and event the vicious, to whom they are bound by ties of race and sex . . . to reclaim them."

The question of the relationship of this new "elite" to the "masses" was crucial to the story of Black America at that time, as it continues to be. Cooper's career as a professional educator shed additional light of the question of her view of the potential of Black people in America, and also raises new problems for constructing a consistent picture of Cooper's life. Despite these doubts, it is certain that those debates had a dramatic impact on Cooper's career.

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