Anna Julia Cooper

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was a scholar, educator, and activist who in 1892 published A Voice from the South — one of the first works of Black feminist theory — and in 1925 became the fourth Black American woman to earn a Ph.D., receiving her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris at the age of 65. Her life spanned from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, and she spent every decade of it fighting for the education of Black people.

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, Cooper was the daughter of an enslaved woman and likely her enslaver. She entered St. Augustine's Normal School at age nine and showed such brilliance that she was tutoring older students by her teens. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College and devoted herself to teaching and educational administration.

Cooper served as principal of the M Street School (later Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C. — the most prestigious Black high school in America — where she insisted on a rigorous college preparatory curriculum against administrators who wanted to limit Black students to vocational training. She was fired for her insistence on academic excellence. Her book A Voice from the South argued that Black women's perspectives were essential to understanding both race and gender in America — an insight that would not become mainstream in academic feminism for nearly a century.