Anna Julia Cooper Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Anna Julia Cooper, organized by topic.
Anna Julia Cooper on Freedom
-
Attributed to Anna Julia Cooper:
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sex, a faction or a party, but the cause of human kind.”
Anna Julia Cooper on God
-
“I am my Sister's keeper! " should be the hearty response of every man and woman of the race, and this conviction should purify and exalt the narrow, selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.”
p. 32 -
“Whence this sneaking admiration we all have for bullies and prize-fighters? Whence the self-congratulation of “dominant” races, as if “dominant” meant “righteous” and carried with it a title to inherit the earth? Whence the scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the very comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out as vermin before this advancing civilization? As if the possession of the Christian graces of meekness, non-resistance and forgiveness, were incompatible with a civilization professedly based on Christianity, the religion of love!”
p. 51 -
“Our God is power; strength, our standard of excellence, inherited from barbarian ancestors through a long line of male progenitors, the Law Salic permitting no feminine modifications.”
p. 53
Anna Julia Cooper on Knowledge
-
Attributed to Anna Julia Cooper:
“Education is the chief means by which the genuine elevation of a people is achieved.”
-
“Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day—respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.”
p. 14 -
“The idea of the radical amelioration of womankind, reverence for woman as woman regardless of rank, wealth, or culture, was to come from that rich and bounteous fountain from which flow all our liberal and universal ideas—the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
p. 14 -
“When colored persons have been employed it was too often as machines or as manikins. There has been no disposition, generally, to get the black man's ideal or to let his individuality work by its own gravity.”
p. 37
Anna Julia Cooper on Love
-
“Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to barbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has been like a child brought up by his father. It has needed the great mother heart to teach it to be pitiful, to love mercy, to succor the weak and care for the lowly.”
p. 51
Anna Julia Cooper on Politics
-
Attributed to Anna Julia Cooper:
“When and where I enter, in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”
-
Attributed to Anna Julia Cooper:
“Only the Black Woman can say where and when I enter.”
-
Attributed to Anna Julia Cooper:
“The progress of any people is to be measured by the position of its women.”
Anna Julia Cooper on Time
-
“The earnest well trained Christian young woman, as a teacher, as a home-maker, as wife, mother, or silent influence even, is as potent a missionary agency among our people as is the theologian; and I claim that at the present stage of our development in the South she is even more important and necessary.”
p. 79
Anna Julia Cooper on Truth
-
“To me, faith means treating the truth as true .”
p. 298
Anna Julia Cooper on Virtue
-
“We too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.”
p. 29