Annie Lee Cooper

Annie Lee Wilkerson was born in Selma, Alabama, on June 2, 1910, one of ten children of Charles Wilkerson Sr. and Lucy Jones. As a girl of about fourteen she left school and traveled north to Kentucky to be with an ailing older sister, and in the years that followed she made a life across several states, living in Kentucky and Ohio and, in the 1940s, running a restaurant in Pennsylvania. Along the way she earned a high school diploma and registered to vote in Kentucky and Ohio, tasting a freedom that Alabama still denied.

In April 1962 she returned to Selma to care for her sick mother, taking work at the Dunn Rest Home. There she resolved to claim the ballot in her own hometown. Time and again she stood before the Dallas County registrars and was turned away; once she waited in line from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon and never reached the desk. On October 7, 1963, she joined some four hundred others for SNCC's Freedom Day at the courthouse, refusing to be moved.

Her name entered history on January 25, 1965. While standing in the registration line at the Dallas County Courthouse, she was prodded by Sheriff Jim Clark. Cooper turned and struck him with a right hook that knocked him to the ground. She was arrested, charged with criminal provocation, and held for some eleven hours before release. The image of her defiance helped galvanize the nation weeks before Bloody Sunday and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Annie Lee Cooper lived to the age of one hundred, dying in Selma on November 24, 2010. John Lewis remembered her as "upfront, pleasant, and absolutely fearless." May her courage be honored as long as the ballot is cherished.