-
Anna Julia Cooper: Black Feminist Scholar, Educator, and Activist
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
192 Anna Julia Cooper Black Feminist Scholar, Educator, and Activist vivian m. may Anna Julia Cooper was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858 and passed away in her Washington, D.C., home in 1964 at age 105. An internationally known black feminist educator, scholar, and activist, she is remembered for demonstrating how the politics of race, gender, nation, and empire intersect. Rather than advocate for one form of civil rights as primary (e.g., racial or gender equality), she argued for models of social change that addressed many forms of inequality together. For a full understanding of Cooper’s views, the effect of growing up in Raleigh, first in slavery on the Haywood plantation and then after emancipation, should not be underestimated. Region was central to her identity, and it influenced her scholarly and political analyses. In Raleigh she began to question existing reality and to think critically about the world around her. There, she first developed her sense of political consciousness , nourished her intellectual yearnings, and embarked on a teaching career that spanned more than seventy years. In her later scholarship, Cooper emphasized the value of knowledge gained from lived experience and underscored that her own experiences as a black North Carolinian woman added nuance to her ideas and insights. More than simply being proud of her regional identity, Cooper argued that thinking about the South was pivotal to everyone’s ability to understand the nation ’s larger issues, past and present. Moreover, examining American history or politics without knowing about life in the South from a black woman’s point of view was narrow-minded. For instance, in her 1893 speech before the Congress of Representative Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Cooper reminded her audience, “I speak for the colored women of the South because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America Anna Julia Cooper 193 has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny is evolving.” She neither presented a romantic vision of black life in the South nor depicted black southern experiences as defined solely by tragedy. She named instances of terror and violation—from lynching to rape, chain gangs to tenant farming—but did not approach slavery, racism, or sexism as all-encompassing systems. Instead, she wanted to trace the inner “divine Spark” or “urge-cell”—sites of internal resistance and possibility even in the context of extreme exploitation. This was important to her, personally and intellectually, because she believed the potential for change was always present and could be realized if people could begin to question everyday assumptions and not accept things as they are. Cooper was born Anna (Annie) Julia Haywood in 1858, daughter of Hannah Stanley (Haywood) (1817–99), who was enslaved. It seems that her “father,” in name only, was Dr. Fabius J. Haywood, her mother’s master. Cooper indicated that her mother’s relations with Haywood were not consensual. Seeing how race exploitation and gender domination were intertwined in her mother’s life shaped Cooper’s worldview. By alluding to some of slavery’s gender-specific aspects of exploitation, learned from her mother and from other enslaved people, Cooper addressed the notion that slavery was “less harsh” in some parts of the South and introduced gender as integral to the history and analysis of racialized experience. As she later argued, all forms of chattel slavery are corrupt and indefensible. Moreover, attempts to measure suffering or to quantify oppression demonstrated faulty logic. Reflecting on her mother’s efforts and connecting those memories to observations about how African Americans across the South struggled, Cooper described how “drudging toil” combined with grinding, widespread “poverty and destitution” deeply affected all African Americans. For instance, they had difficulty accumulating capital or owning property. Trying to do so was “like gathering water in a sieve.” African Americans had insufficient nourishment for mind and body, engaged in backbreaking, underpaid labor, and experienced higher morbidity and mortality rates than whites. Cooper had two older brothers in Raleigh: Rufus and Andrew Haywood. Rufus was born around 1836, worked as a carpenter and musician, and married a woman named Nancy. Andrew, born in 1848, was also a musician, a bricklayer by profession, and a soldier in the Spanish American War. Andrew married Jane Henderson, who worked as a cook. Since her brothers were older, Cooper grew up with her mother...