Diary: Anna Julia Cooper (I), There is no such things as “mere culture“

Anna Julia Cooper, ca 1902

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina. After Emancipation, she made her way to the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh. Freedmen’s schools at the time were coeducational, because they lacked funds to set up separate schooling for boys and girls, but they did not offer equal education. Anna successfully petitioned to study Greek and Latin, and when she went from there the country’s first college to accept both Black and women students, Oberlin, she again had to petition for access to “Gentleman’s Courses.” As a teacher and then principal of the country’s most prestigious secondary school for Black students, M Street School in Washington, DC, she was a forceful advocate for racial equality, women’s rights, and education in the humanities for women and Black people, objecting to a reduced, vocational “colored” curriculum and advocating for giving students “a course of study equal to their abilities.”