“Dear Doctor Du Bois”: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing

It is my wish that Two Hundred Seventy Nine Dollars 65 cents contributed in honor of my hundredth birthday be deposited at interest in Savings Dept. of National Savings & Trust Company to be used later in publication of my work on Ethics of Negro Problem and Dialect.

—Anna Julia Cooper (Cooper to Afro-American 2 Sept. 1958)

In the last four decades, selections from Anna Julia Cooper’s most well-known work A Voice from the South by A Black Woman of the South (1892) have been reprinted in anthologies and collections over three dozen times. The prevalence and accessibility of her work, however, belies the arduous history that characterized Cooper’s attempts to secure a public voice in print. Although she was one of the most active public intellectuals of her day, Cooper struggled continually to secure the publication of her writings, cultivating an array of outlets in an effort to get her words in front of local, national, and international audiences. Given the complex history of Cooper’s publishing efforts, the 1958 letter from which the epigraph above is drawn is perhaps a more suitable emblem of her publishing career than are the dozens of discretely circulating excerpts from her 1892 collection. In the letter, Cooper, writing at one hundred years of age, asserts herself once again as the tenaciously active agent advocating for the publication of her own writings and words. With her characteristically meticulous hand straining to maintain a vestige of its former self, Cooper, across inconsistent line breaks and with tremulously drawn letters, reaches out to posterity in a final effort to steward into print her writings on race, gender, and culture.

In particular, I consider Cooper’s struggles to publish several of her essays in The Crisis magazine, reading her publication efforts and the challenges she faced through a series of thirty-three letters she exchanged with W. E. B. Du Bois between 1923 and 1932. These letters, recently digitized by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Credo Project, document the racialized, gendered, and classed power dynamics that pervaded Cooper’s attempts to secure adequate publication outlets for her work, establish her community-based vision for black publishing, and provide insights into her innovative strategies for negotiating the strictures of the publishing industry. While the letters indicate a much more reciprocal relationship between Cooper and Du Bois than previously assumed,¹ they also provide further evidence of what Joy James has identified as Du Bois’s “profeminist politics” (70), in which he could advocate for black women’s liberation while failing to recognize adequately black women’s intellectual contributions to the very causes he championed.² In Cooper’s dealings with Du Bois during his tenure as editor of The Crisis, for instance, he offered his general support to Cooper, but time and again he resisted, neglected, or otherwise failed to assist Cooper in the actual publication of her writing.

More than merely documenting the gender politics of black publishing, however, these letters, along with other key moments in Cooper’s publishing history, establish Cooper’s expansive concept of black publishing as part and parcel of an activist platform that could build and support black arts and education, dispute and debate racist propaganda, introduce positive images of African Americans, expand the knowledge base of African American readers by introducing important international and domestic scholarship to its readership, and serve as a space for democratic dialogue and critical debate. Thus, Cooper’s critical commentaries on the role of the black press, alongside her innovative engagements with print culture, constitute an African American feminist theory and praxis of black publishing that challenged the gendered and hierarchical norms regulating access to the publishing industry.³ Through her redefinition of the role of the editor, as articulated in her letters to Du Bois and carried out in her own work as editor of Life and Writings of the Grimke Family (1951), and through her manipulations of “scrapbooking” techniques that she used to collect and preserve her own writings, Cooper enacted a collective, dialogical...