Anna Julia Cooper
When Anna Julia Cooper was principal of the prestigious M Street High School in Washington, DC in 1892, where she also taught and mentored Black students, the White members of the DC Board of Education decided her intellect and ambition for her Black students was too much for them. So they forced her out.
The story of her impact and ouster from the school was vividly and creatively told in the play “Tempestuous Elements,” at the Arena Stage in a 360 stage that enabled powerful yet subtle dynamics. The evening I attended, it was a full house, with a mostly White audience across a wide age range, from what I could observe.
Cooper, who had been born to an enslaved mother in 1858 in Raleigh, NC, was clearly intellectually gifted from a young age, receiving scholarships, eschewing the “ladies classes” for mathematics, science, literature and the classic languages of Latin and Greek.
That thirst for knowledge and determination stayed for her entire life, and was central to what she tried to pass along to her students.
Like most children of the era, Cooper never knew who her father one, though it is believed to have been either the man who enslaved her mother, George Washington Haywood (1802–1890), one of the sons of the founder of the University of North Carolina, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood.
“The first and most prestigious public high school for Black education”
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper, by Shirley Moody-Turner
Shirley Moody-Turner, the editor of “The Portable Anna Julia Cooper,” described the M Street School in the Washington Post recently as, “the first and most prestigious public high school for Black education.” She said, “Black people from around the country aspired to send their children” there, because “its roster of teachers and graduates read like a Who’s Who of Washington’s Black educational and cultural elite.” While Cooper was principal, M Street School students secured scholarships to top colleges and universities, such as Harvard, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth.
Those accomplishments intimidated the White members of the DC Board of Education, who were apparently unwilling to see Black students, especially women, as smart, capable and ambitious. They conjured up accusations against Cooper of lax discipline – a curious accusation as M Street students continued to outperform other DC schools. An attractive and stylish woman who was widowed at a young age, the Board conjured up racy stories about Cooper’s personal life too as fodder to precipitate her ouster.
But it seemed to really be about keeping women and Blacks “in their place,” and not wanting them to achieve too much. As Moody-Turner wrote in the Washington Post, Cooper was a lightning rod during “a moment of intense political and social backlash against racial advancement and gender equality.”
Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, Liz Magill, President of University of ... [+]
Unfortunately, we seem to be seeing shades of the same manipulations by (mostly White) school boards and politicians today, as they try to curtail Black history and educational opportunities, including forcing out Black female leaders at esteemed academic institutions, across the U.S.
A civil rights leader for Blacks, women and Black education
They should have known she would be a force to reckon with, because was considered “a leader in 19th and 20th century Black women’s organizing,” having published at least two seminal works advocating for educating Black women, including in classical literature, Latin, Greek, math and science.
In 1890-91, she published the essay "Higher Education of Women", and in 1892 she published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, about systematic oppression, racism, misogyny/sexism, and class-ism, calling for equal rights.
She espoused the importance of education for Black women to help advance the Black community, which many of the era found subversive to the wide-spread oppression of “Negroes” (as Blacks were called at the time) and of women, whose roles were being circumscribed (e.g. by what was then called the “cult of true womanhood”).
As the character of Lula (played by Renea S. Brown) says to Cooper in Tempestuous Elements, “Your esteemed résumé as writer, orator, community leader and educator — women are consistently and abominably overlooked among the intelligentsia, but they couldn’t overlook you.”
They couldn’t stand in her way either and she had the last say – and a lesson for today
Despite being ostracized by the Washington, DC Board of Education and removed from her positions as principal and teacher at the M Street School, Cooper went on to earn a PhD in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne – only the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree at the time.
But by 1910, the school recruited her back, and she taught there for the next 20 years, during which time the school was renamed Dunbar.
She continued in education administration and advocating for the intellectual education of Blacks and women into her 90’s and passed away at 105 years old, in 1964.
As the character of Cooper (played by Gina Daniels) says early in Tempestuous Elements, “Do you not realize that without contemplating the wrongs of America’s past, a very recent past, we leave ourselves open for that terrible history to repeat itself?”
