(Published in 1892, A Voice from the South is the only boo...)
Published in 1892, A Voice from the South is the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era.
Anna Cooper was an American writer, educator, and activist. She championed education for African Americans and women.
Background
Anna Cooper was born on August 10, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Anna Cooper was born on August 10, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Born into bondage, she was the daughter of an enslaved woman, Hannah Stanley, and her owner, George Washington Haywood.
Education
In 1868, two years after the end of the Civil War, Anna Cooper began her formal education at Saint Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute, a coeducational facility built for former slaves. There she received the equivalent of a high school education. When her husband died in 1879, Cooper decided to pursue a college degree. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio on a tuition scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1884 and a Masters in Mathematics in 1887. Also, Cooper studied in 1914 at Columbia University in New York. After the death of her brother in 1915, however, she postponed pursuing her doctorate to raise his five grandchildren. She returned to school in 1924 when she enrolled at the University of Paris in France. In 1925, at the age of 67, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to obtain a Doctorate of Philosophy.
Anna Cooper worked as a domestic servant in the Haywood home. During education, her academic achievements enabled her to work as a tutor for younger children. After graduation, Cooper worked at Oberlin Academy in 1883-1884, and then at Wilberforce University, where he also served as ahead of the modern languages department, and Saint Augustine's before moving to Washington, to teach at Washington High School (now M Street High School). She met another teacher, Mary Church Terrell, who, along with Cooper, boarded at the home of Alexander Crummell, a prominent clergyman, intellectual, and proponent of African American emigration to Liberia. In 1902 she became a principal of M Street High School. The white Washington school board disagreed with her educational approach for black students, which focused on college preparation, and Cooper left that position in 1906. She retired in 1930. Besides, Cooper was a chair of the department of languages at Lincoln University from 1906 to 1910.
Also, Anna Cooper was a writer. She published her first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, in 1892. In addition to calling for equal education for women, A Voice from the South advanced Cooper’s assertion that educated African American women were necessary for uplifting the entire black race. The book of essays gained national attention, and Cooper began lecturing across the country on topics such as education, civil rights, and the status of black women.
In addition to working to advance African American educational opportunities, Anna Cooper also established and co-founded several organizations to promote black civil rights causes. She helped found the Colored Women's League in 1892, and she joined the executive committee of the first Pan-African Conference in 1900. Since the Young Women's Christian Association and the Young Men's Christian Association did not accept African American members, she created "colored" branches to provide support for young black migrants moving from the South into Washington.
In 1930, Anna Cooper retired from teaching to assume the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, a school for black adults, which she was a co-founder in 1907. She served as the school's registrar after it became the Frelinghuysen Group of Schools for Colored People. Cooper remained in that position until the school closed in the 1950s. Anna Cooper died in 1964 in Washington, at the age of 105.
(The book was published after Anna Cooper's death in 1964.)
1998
Views
Throughout her life, Anna Cooper was dedicated to the fight for educational opportunities for women, which she considered key to social equality. She combined her instructional work with a dedication to the struggle for female suffrage.
Quotations:
"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party, or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity."