Anna Julia Cooper

Anna Julia Haywood was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the tenth of August 1858, the daughter of Hannah Stanley, an enslaved woman. Her father is generally believed to have been her mother's enslaver, George Washington Haywood, though the record leaves his identity uncertain. Emancipation opened a door, and the gifted child stepped through it: at nine she won a scholarship to Saint Augustine's Normal School in Raleigh, where she insisted on studying the "men's" courses closed to girls and later taught.

She carried that resolve to Oberlin College in Ohio, earning a bachelor's degree in 1884 and a master's in mathematics in 1887. In 1892 she published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, a landmark of American letters now regarded as a founding text of Black feminist thought, arguing that the dignity and education of Black women were the true measure of the race's progress and the nation's conscience.

For decades she taught and led at Washington's celebrated M Street High School, defending a rigorous classical curriculum for Black students against those who would narrow their horizons. In 1925, at the age of sixty-six, she defended her doctoral thesis on France and slavery at the Sorbonne, becoming the fourth Black woman in America known to earn a doctorate. In her later years she served Frelinghuysen University, opening higher learning to working Black adults.

She died in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-seventh of February 1964, having lived one hundred and five years. From bondage to the Sorbonne, Anna Julia Cooper gave her long life to the conviction that no soul is too humble for greatness. We honor her enduring voice.