Anna Julia Cooper 1858 – 1964

Anna Julia Cooper was an American philosopher, educator, and one of the founding voices of African-American feminist thought, the fourth African-American woman to receive a doctorate of philosophy and a longtime principal of the M Street School in Washington, D.C. A Voice from the South, her 1892 collection of essays, mounted a sustained argument that the elevation of African-American women, who stand at the intersection of race and sex, must be the test of the genuineness of any American moral progress. Her doctoral dissertation, defended at the Sorbonne in 1925, treated the attitudes of France toward slavery during the Revolution, and made her one of the earliest figures to bring philosophical attention to the global history of racial oppression.

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, in August 1858, the daughter of an enslaved Black woman and her white enslaver. She was educated at St Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, took her bachelor's at Oberlin College in 1884 and her master's at Oberlin in 1887 — among the first African-American women to take an MA — and in 1925, at the age of sixty-six, completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris with a thesis on French attitudes to slavery during the Revolution. She was the fourth Black woman to receive a doctorate in any field.

She taught for forty years at the M Street, later Dunbar, High School in Washington, was its principal from 1902 to 1906, and from 1929 served as president of the experimental Frelinghuysen University, founded for working African-Americans. Her books include A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892), the doctoral thesis L'Attitude de la France à l'égard de l'esclavage pendant la Révolution (1925), and the late memoir Personal Recollections of the Grimké Family (1951).

Cooper argued that the lives, voices, and education of Black women were the indispensable measure of the moral and intellectual standing of the American republic, and with W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Sylvester Williams, and Bishop Alexander Walters helped to convene the first Pan-African Conference at London in 1900. She is now recognised as a foundational figure of Black feminist thought. She died at Washington, DC, in February 1964 at the age of one hundred and five.