Anna Julia Cooper

Anna Julia Haywood was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the tenth of August 1858, the daughter of George Washington Haywood (a white slaveholder) and his enslaved housekeeper Hannah Stanley. She lived to one hundred and five.

She took her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in 1884 and her master's there in 1887 — among the first generations of Black women to earn graduate degrees from any American university. She taught for forty years at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., the leading Black academic high school in the United States, where she trained successive generations of Black students for college admission to elite Northern universities at a time when few schools did so.

In 1892 she published A Voice from the South — the first sustained Black-feminist analysis of American society. The book argued that the condition of Black women was the moral test of any American polity: "Only the Black Woman can say, when and where I enter ... the whole Negro race enters with me." It remains the foundational text of Black feminism in the United States.

She earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1925, at the age of sixty-six, on a dissertation about France's attitude toward slavery during the Haitian Revolution. She was the fourth Black woman in American history to earn a doctorate.

She continued to write, teach, and organize until her death in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-seventh of February 1964, at the age of one hundred and five.

She is honored here as the scholar whose voice from the South named the test the republic has yet to pass.