The Unsung Mother of Black Feminism

On the last day of Black History Month, meet history-making Anna Julia Cooper

BY REBECCA CARROLL

ANNA JULIA COOPER CIRCA 1902 (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

If you really want to “listen to Black women,” start with Anna Julia Cooper.

Widely considered the mother of Black feminism, she was among the most important Black women educators, essayists, and activists of the 19th century. She defended her dissertation at 66—in French—at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925, almost certainly making her the first woman born into slavery to earn a PhD. (Meanwhile, that year, back in her adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., 30,000 members of the KKK were marching in a public demonstration of white supremacy.) And Cooper is the only Black woman quoted on the U.S. passport: “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.”

She lived to 105, yet few people today know her by name, even if they know many of her words.

For instance, the phrase “when and where I enter” is often attributed to the abolitionist Martin Delany, the first Black field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War, who said in full, “When and where I enter, my people enter with me.” But it was Cooper who turned the phrase into what would go on to become a foundational fighting text for Black women in America. “Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood…then and there the whole Negro race enters with me,” Cooper wrote in her seminal 1892 collection of speeches and essays, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South.

In fact, in the 1890s, more than a decade before W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “double-consciousness” to describe the dual sense of self experienced by Black Americans, Cooper was speaking and writing about the dual marginalization of race and gender that Black women face. And while a lot of 19th century Black public intellectuals (like Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and Cooper’s Oberlin classmate Mary Church Terrell) were formulating theories about racism and sexism at that time, Cooper was among the first to connect these oppressions—essentially an intersectional feminist almost a century before the term was coined.

Du Bois’s theory was that to be Black in America meant seeing oneself through two specific lenses: the oppressive white gaze, and the identity of a liberated Black self. But Cooper took a more inclusive and nuanced stance at a time when being a woman was too often considered something else entirely—even by Du Bois himself.

It’s well-documented that Cooper struggled to get her work published in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, where Du Bois served as editor from its founding in 1910 until his resignation in 1934. In a series of 33 letters the two exchanged between 1923 and 1932—thirty years after her essay collection was published—Cooper appealed to Du Bois to publish her newer works. The tenor of their correspondence is cordial, but it’s clear that Du Bois, who nominally expressed support for Cooper’s writing, was more comfortable talking the “profeminist politics” talk than actually walking the walk: He never published her.

He was not the only man to fail to show Cooper the respect she deserved.

A PORTRAIT OF COOPER CIRCA 1892, SCANNED FROM HER BOOK (FAIR USE)

Born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, Cooper was the daughter of an enslaved Black woman, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and, it is widely believed, her white enslaver, Fabius J. Haywood. She turned six the year of Emancipation and, like many newly freed Black kids in Raleigh, enrolled in Saint Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute at the age of nine. She excelled, and her young activism included protesting the boys-only admission to Greek and Latin courses.

“A boy…had only to declare a floating intention to study theology and he could get all the support, encouragement and stimulus he needed,” she wrote in A Voice from the South. “While a self-supporting girl had to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragement to the higher education.”

By the age of 11, though, she was made a scholarship-teacher (for $100 a year) to tutor other students. And she did eventually get the chance to study Greek with the boys. She married her husband, George A.C. Cooper—a minister and Greek teacher at Saint Augustine—in 1877 at the age of 19, and remained at the school as a matron. But George died from an unknown illness two years later, and Cooper enrolled at Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1881, eventually earning two degrees. Higher education for all Black people, but especially Black women, became Cooper’s main fight while there, and remained so throughout her life.

After leaving Oberlin with her master’s, she became an accomplished academic and speaker. In many of those speeches, and in her essays, Cooper—whose vision for feminism included all women—was openly critical of white women suffragists for blatantly sidelining not just Black women, but all non-white women, in their fight to secure women’s right to vote. In fact, she considered it a betrayal. From her essay “Women Versus the Indian”: “Is not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking debate or an aristocratic pink tea? Why should woman become plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness?”

WHILE MANY MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN THE STORY OF ANNA JULIA COOPER, PASSPORT HOLDERS CARRY HER WORDS WITH THEM. 

As an educator, she fought on behalf of her students, which earned her enemies. She angered the board of the school at which she became principal when she successfully advocated for many of her Black students to pursue collegiate studies rather than be pushed into vocational training. And then, at the same school, the long-widowed Cooper found herself at the center of a smear campaign when she refused to stop helping students gain admittance to and attend college. Members of the board accused her of having an affair with a young man in her professional circle, and brought the fabricated scandal to the local press. Ultimately, despite public support on her side, she was forced out of the school in 1906.

Despite other stops and starts—including a period when she adopted her five nieces and nephews—she was determined to earn her PhD, which she finally completed in her sixties after transferring to the Sorbonne. And throughout her career, she managed to nurture close ties with her loved ones. “Her family called her Sis Annie, her closest friends, Cookie,” remembers Shirley Moody-Turner, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University, and editor of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper. “Her students presented her with flowers, and cards, and gifts, and candy.” In the later part of her life, Moody-Turner says, “her closest friend and fellow educator, Lula Love [Lawson], sent Cooper dresses, slippers, foot powder, and insoles to make sure that Cooper was comfortable, fashionable, and cared for.”

In making sure Cooper is honored for her extraordinary contributions to the canon of Black feminism, it can be hard not to flatten her into a symbol. But let’s also remember that our heroine was just as much Sis Annie as Anna Julia Cooper, who loved flowers and candy, who stopped her world to care for her family, and stayed looking fly.

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