Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), was born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1868 she began an pursuing an education that took her from Raleigh, to Oberlin, to Washington D.C, eventually earning a Ph.D from the University of Paris in 1925. She was the fourth American black woman to do so.
Beyond her extraordinary educational pursuits, she also managed to break into the boy’s club of black intelligentsia. She was the first woman to receive an invitation to the American Negro Academy.
She was also a prolific speaker and publisher on the condition and role of the black woman. Her opus A Voice From the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892) was one of the first works to discuss the intersecting oppressions experienced by by black women. However, she also argued that women would be essential to the “regeneration, the re-training of the [black] race.”
The argument is a bit dated now, and relies on a very nineteenth century understanding of womanhood but when compared to the popular narratives of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement , where the role of women has all but disappeared from popular re-tellings, Cooper’s insistence in 1892 that black women have a central and unique role in the struggle against oppression and that no male leader has the right to speak for the black woman, is nothing short of a miracle.
This year Professor Melissa Harris-Perry (more on her later this month) founded The Anna Julia Cooper Project at Tulane University. The Project is devoted to studying race, gender and politics in the South.
