August 10 …

Anna Julia Cooper — born Anna Julia Hayward on August 10, 1858 — was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, Black feminist leader, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although born enslaved, Cooper pursued higher education at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1884 and a master’s degree in mathematics in 1887. At the age of 66, she completed her PhD. at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1924), making her the fourth African-American woman to earn a PhD. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.’s African-American community, and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Cooper made significant contributions to the social sciences, particularly sociology. Her first published work in 1892, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, is a collection of essays focusing on racial progress and women’s rights and is widely acknowledged as one of the first articulations of Black feminism.

Cooper lived to be 105 years old, witnessing the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights Movement. Through it all, she taught, she wrote, and she spoke out for justice.

Cooper lived out her beliefs: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind.” 

The words of Anna Julia Cooper now live on in U.S. passports, and in the legacy she left behind — a reminder that even in the face of impossible odds, brilliance and courage can shape the world.