Annie Lee Cooper

Annie Lee Wilkerson was born in Selma, Alabama, on the second of June 1910, the daughter of a Methodist minister. She moved north to Kentucky and to Pennsylvania across her early adult life and returned to Selma in 1963 to care for her aging mother. She had been a registered voter in Ohio and Pennsylvania during her northern years; she discovered on return that Selma's segregationist voter-registration system had effectively barred her — and the substantial Black majority of Dallas County — from local registration for the entirety of her life there.

She attempted to register at the Dallas County Courthouse repeatedly across 1963 and 1964 under the systematic harassment that Sheriff Jim Clark's deputies applied to Black voter-registration applicants. She was fired from her hospital nursing position in Selma on the day after her first registration attempt — a standard reprisal of the period.

On the twenty-fifth of January 1965 — at the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma, during one of the formal voter-registration days that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had organized as part of the Selma campaign — Annie Lee Cooper was standing in the registration line when Sheriff Jim Clark approached her, twisted her arm, and shoved her. She turned, formed a fist, and struck him squarely in the temple — knocking him to his knees. Four deputies dragged her to the ground; she got up and struck Clark twice more before being beaten unconscious and arrested.

The photograph the Associated Press wire-service photographer Horace Cort captured — Sheriff Clark, on his knees, his deputies attempting to subdue Cooper — was published the following day across the American press. The image was a substantial catalyst for the federal civil-rights pressure that produced the Selma march six weeks later and the Voting Rights Act six months later.

She was registered to vote in Dallas County after the Voting Rights Act took effect in August 1965. She voted in every subsequent local, state, and federal election through her remaining forty-five years.

She died in Selma on the twenty-fourth of November 2010, age one hundred.

She is honored here as the centenarian whose January 1965 fist made the photograph that Selma was organized around.