Intellectual Activism: The Praxis of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper as a Blueprint for Equity-Based Pedagogy

Introduction

Having faced seemingly insurmountable challenges of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and de facto discriminatory practices, African Americans have historically championed education as a vehicle for community enrichment (Anderson Education; Cooper Voice; Giddings).¹ Thus, among African Americans, education has long served as a mechanism to facilitate societal transformation—the form of transformation that addresses social inequities. For many African Americans, however, educational access was an elusive proposition because the entanglements of race, gender, and class placed them at a disadvantage. Furthermore, the few who reached the highest strata of educational attainment had to contend with institutional processes that operated to undermine their legitimacy or discourage their investment in social equity issues (Collins Fighting; Anderson “Race”; Malveaux). Often barred from the most resource-rich institutions, Black scholars committed to improving the life outcomes of others had to determine how to fulfill their altruistic agenda while maintaining their cerebral endeavors. Despite these challenges, some scholars were able to marry their intellectualism with community activism. Most notable among them is Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, an educator who rose from slavery to become the fourth African-American female to receive a PhD degree. Through an exploration of Cooper’s life and praxis, this paper serves as a blueprint for scholars invested in merging theory and social action to enact what I label intellectual activism. Most importantly, it places Cooper’s work within a paradigm that names educational access as a human right because her educational philosophy challenges structures and practices that hinder personal development and engagement in civic life.

Framing Higher Education: A Contradiction of Principles

A discussion of how Cooper’s intellectual activism informs higher education practice first requires a basic understanding of higher education’s role in the formation of the United States and its historical position in the lives of African Americans. U.S. higher education first evolved as a vehicle for the incubation of religious leadership among a select group of men (Bogue and Aper). Although religious instruction was indelibly woven into its edifice, higher education also served as an instrument of acculturation and social stability (Vine,; Rudolph; Cremin). Harvard College, for instance, was founded in 1636 to ensure the propagation of Puritan beliefs because the “state would need competent rulers, the church would require a learned clergy, and society itself would need the adornment of cultured men” (Rudolph 6). Similarly, subsequent colonial colleges were founded to reinforce the mores of the elite and to distinguish White settlers from native communities through the study of rhetoric, mathematics, Latin, and theology. Thus, between the seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, American higher education focused on reproducing elite English culture and cementing Christian doctrine, thereby operating as a key socializing institution for men who would lead a fledging country (Rudolph; Vine; Bogue and Aper).

Despite the righteous ideas that characterized early colleges, they did not defy the discriminatory and dehumanizing codes of the era. Hence, racism and sexism were tolerated and served as rationale for the exclusion of people of color and White women from college. Most poignantly, just five years after the founding of Harvard College, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery, and as other colonial colleges were established, the enslavement of Africans became slowly woven into the American social fabric (Giddings; Higginbotham). Even after the formation of the republic and the pronouncement that all men have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, American colleges remained bastions of White, male elitism. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of public higher education, wrote of the intellectual inferiority of Africans: “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. . .. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (257).

Jefferson’s disparaging remarks embodied America’s contradiction. On the one hand, as a political...