Anna Julia Cooper
1858-1964 20th century
Dignity held like a prayer, for a long time, with no one to acknowledge it.
Who was Anna Julia Cooper?
Born into slavery in North Carolina, daughter of her mother and her mother's owner, she learned to read at an Episcopal school for freed people and fought to sit in the Greek classes reserved for boys. A teacher and then principal of the M Street School in Washington, she sent her Black pupils to universities that did not want them, and lost her post for it. At fifty-seven she adopted her half-brother's five orphaned grandchildren; at sixty-six she defended her doctorate at the Sorbonne. She taught until she was ninety, in an evening university run out of her own house.
In their own words
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class; it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.
Only the Black woman can say: when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suffrage, there the whole Negro race enters with me.
We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition.