Today’s blog post is about a North Carolinian most North Carolinians have never heard of. Such is the way that women and people of color have been left out of our history books.

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born in slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina on August 10, 1858. She never knew who her father was. This wonderful photograph of her can be found at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016702852/.

After the slaves were emancipated, she enrolled in St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh. The school was supported by the Freedmen’s Bureau and was created to educate black people to become teachers. A local pastor made it financially possible for her to attend the school.

She was not just any student. She went to school at St. Augustine’s for 14 years and took every course offered, including the ones that had only been open to male students.

She graduated in 1877 and married George A.C. Cooper, a theology student at St. Augustine’s from the Bahamas. Unfortunately, George died in 1879.

Cooper taught at St. Augustine’s for two more years after her husband’s death until she was accepted for study at Oberlin College in Ohio. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin in 1884 and an honorary Master’s degree there in 1887.

She started teaching at the M Street Washington High School in Washington, D.C. in 1887, and became more involved in social activism after moving to the nation’s capital. She was an advocate for black students to have college opportunities.

Cooper’s book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, was published in 1892. It is acclaimed as the first book-length work about black feminism. She put forth the theory that black women were in the unique position of having to face discrimination due to their gender and the color of their skin. (I’m sure Dr. Cooper would be distressed to know that they are still in that position in 2026!)

Cooper helped found the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C. in 1892 and served as the corresponding secretary. At the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in Boston in 1895, Cooper was a delegate. She delivered a paper calling for organization of black people at the conference. The National Federation of Afro-American Women no doubt came about in response to the Boston conference. Cooper took an active role in that organization.

In 1900, Cooper spoke at the Pan-African Conference in London, but she focused her efforts in her own community in Washington, D.C. where she became the principal of the M Street High School.

She and W.E.B. DuBois had similar theories about race, but DuBois and Booker T. Washington locked horns. Cooper moved to Missouri for a while to get away from their political differences. She returned to M Street High School in 1911.

In case you aren’t sufficiently impressed by Anna Julia Haywood Cooper…

In 1912, she went to Paris and finished translating Le Pèleringae de Charlemagne. She studied at Columbia University for several summers and then completed her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris, thus becoming the fourth black American woman to earn a Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis about slavery and the French Revolution was translated into English in 1988.

Dr. Cooper became president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. in 1929. She gave the university her home for its permanent site. The “Hannah Stanley Opportunity School” at the university was named for Dr. Cooper’s mother.

Dr. Cooper died at the age of 105 on February 27, 1964. She and her husband were buried in City Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.

My March 20, 2026 blog post

When I posted a blog titled “Puzzling Banners at Dept. of Education” on March 20, 2026, Ni of ShiraDestProjectDoBetter (shiradest.wordpress.com) reminded me that Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s image should have been on one of the banners hanging on the U.S. Department of Education headquarters building in Washington, D.C.

(To jog your memory, in my post I questioned why in the world Charlie Kirk’s image was on one of the banners. I never did figure that one out!)

Ni was exactly right. Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s image should have been honored there alongside Booker T. Washington and Catharine Beecher.

Janet

Never take access to higher education for granted.