Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

Born a slave in 1858 in North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper spent her life as an educator and scholar working to advocate for the rights of black women, African Americans, and women until she died in 1964.  When asked to describe her vocation, Cooper answered: “The Education of neglected people” (Lemert and Bhan, 13). As an educator and principal at the M Street School in Washington D.C., Cooper emphasized the importance of a classical education as a means of attaining equality.

In addition to her educational philosophy, Cooper believed deeply in the development of the home as the cradle for the generation of morality and manners. In her essay “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of the Race,” Cooper presents the importance of the American home for the nation as a whole. “The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole sum of all its parts, so the character of the parts will determine the characteristics of the whole” (Lemert and Bhan, 63). She manifested this belief in her own home-building. In Washington D.C., she opened her own home to both her students as well as two foster children and five orphans whom she raised and cared for as a single woman, economically supporting herself and her family and nurturing the community.

While working, Cooper also pursued her own intellectual advancement at Columbia University and eventually completed her doctoral studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, writing a thesis on the French attitude toward slavery during the period of the French Revolution (Lemert and Bhan, 6). Cooper is recognized as one of the first Black women to receive a Ph.D., an accomplishment she made in her sixties: evidence of her lifelong pursuit of education and knowledge.

As a scholar, Cooper contributed some of the founding philosophical ideas, observations, and theories of womanhood, race, and black feminism. Cooper wrote on the unique position of black women in society, their moral superiority, and the universality of the women’s emancipation movement, “a great national and international movement characteristic of this age and country, a movement based on the inherent right of every soul to its own highest development” (Lemert and Bhan, 100). In the Voice of the South, her most well-known work, Cooper’s analysis of status of the black woman, the African American, and the nation as a whole provides a framework for understanding how “the nation was foredained for conflict from its incipiency” (Lemert and Bhan, 128) and how to move forward and reach the “ideal America.”

While in much of her writing Cooper theorizes about black womanhood or blackness specifically, there is undeniable patriotic tone underlying much of what she says. Cooper’s perspective on the United States is one that is grounded in virtue and faith; both religious and political. Beyond her application of the nation’s founding ideals to her scholarship, she admits “to being an optimist on the subject of [her] country” in a Voice of the South (Lemert and Bahn, 129).

It is this optimism, this belief and devotion to understanding how the issues of the United States came to be and how to possibly address that makes Cooper patriotic. It is her commitment to her students, to their education that will grant them the social mobility promised by American democracy and to her own intellectual growth that captures the spirit of the patriot. It is her advocacy for not just black women and black men, but for all people that makes her a patriot. This humanist perspective is the foundation of the ideals of America.  Whether she would have considered herself a patriot, we cannot know, but her writing and life provides a model for public service and devotion to one’s country.

Below is a “timeline” of quotations from the various essays that make up Cooper’s Voice of the South. Ideas of patriotism emerge from these quotations as Cooper reveals her humanist perspective through the discussion of various issues and phenomenon occurring during her lifetime in the U.S.

Reference:

The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, And Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.