ANNA JULIA COOPER (portrayed by Shelley P. Haley) “Representing Our Ancestors”

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964): Teacher and Principal, M Street School. 1884 BA, 1885 MA Oberlin College, 1925 PhD University of Paris, Sorbonne. Author of A Voice from the South (1892).

Born Annie Julia Haywood in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Cooper was the child of a slave woman, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and her white master, George Washington Haywood. When the Episcopal Church opened St Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute for newly freed slaves in 1868, Annie Haywood, then about nine and a half years old, was among the first to enter. As a teenager Cooper began protesting against sexism when she realized that men, as candidates for the ministry at St. Augustine's, were given preferential treatment, while the women were steered away from studying theology and the classics. She complained to the principal that “the only mission open before a girl . . . was to marry one of those candidates.”

In 1877 at the age of nineteen, Annie Haywood did in fact marry one of those candidates for the ministry, George Cooper. Widowed by his death two years later, Cooper began writing letters to Oberlin in 1881 to request free tuition and to apply for employment so she could earn her room and board. Cooper rejected the distinctly inferior “Ladies Course” at Oberlin and chose the “Gentleman's Course”—the classical curriculum that led to a BA—which caused no collapse at the college, as she sarcastically noted, though the school administrators thought it was a dangerous experiment.

Cooper obtained a BA from Oberlin in 1884 and later an MA also from Oberlin. In 1887 as one of the few Blacks with a graduate degree, she was recruited by the Superintendent for Colored Schools to teach at Washington's only Black high school—first known as the Washington Colored High School, then as M Street High School. During her tenure at M Street, she taught Latin, math and science; she became the principal of M Street in January 1902.

At the time Booker T Washington's program of vocational and industrial training was emerging as the model for Black education and consequently played into the prejudices of whites who believed in Black intellectual inferiority. By contrast Cooper staunchly maintained M Street's orientation toward preparing Black youth for college. In defiance of her white supervisor who told her that colored children should be taught only trades, Cooper sent several of her students to prestigious universities and colleges including Harvard, Brown, Oberlin, Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Radcliffe. During her tenure as principal, M Street was accredited for the first time by Harvard. For her intransigence, Cooper was eventually forced to resign.

In 1910 a new superintendent summoned Cooper back to resume her position as a Latin teacher. For the next fifty years, she continued to be active: she had a full schedule of teaching and she continued her “Home Work”, i.e., work on her doctorate, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Despite obstacles from her supervisors at M Street, Cooper was awarded a doctorate from the University of Paris in 1925. At 67, she was the fourth American Black woman to receive a PhD.

Anna Julia Cooper proudly listed membership in the Classical Association of the Atlantic States on her "Individual Occupational History" of 1932, when she was 72 years old. She died peacefully in her sleep at home in 1964, at the age of 105.