anna j cooper
Anna J. Cooper Anna Julia Cooper was born in 1858 to a slave and a slave owner in North Carolina. She attended St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute for the colored. After she graduated she began advocating for people of color especially for women of color. Cooper strongly believed that the status and well-being of black women was a central part of the progression and equality of the nation. Throughout her life she fought relentlessly to uplift black women in hopes for a more just society for everyone. She famously wrote in her book A Voice from the South, “only the black women 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”(Cooper 54). Cooper described her teaching profession as “the education of the neglected people,” she felt that education, more specifically higher education, as the path of black women’s advancement (55). She believed that educational development women remove any need for reliance on men (Giddings 138). In 1902 Cooper was promoted to principle at M Street School where she taught math and science. With her firm belief that education was the pathway to progress for people of color, she often rejected her white supervisors’ authorization to teach her students different types of trades, and instead she prepared them for college. Cooper sent her student’s to some of the most respected universities, which helped the M Street School get accreditation from Harvard, but rather than her success be celebrated it was received with hostility from white supervisors and white supremacy that didn’t want to see the advancement of black youth. While Cooper was teaching at the M Street School she was heavily involved in building spaces for black women outside of education. She founded the Colored Women’s League of Washington in 1892, and in1900 she helped open the first YWCA chapter for black women, in