Shirley Moody-Turner - The Portable Anna Julia Cooper

Penguin Classics

anna julia cooper was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858. After working her way through Saint Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute and Oberlin College, she was recruited to the nations capital to teach, and later serve as principal, at what would become the most prestigious secondary school for African Americans in the country, M Street, later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. While principal at M Street she waged what she termed her courageous revolt against attempts to assign to Black students inferior colored curriculum. Fighting for the rights of all students to equal access to higher education, and especially Black women and girls, would become a defining focus of Coopers lifes work. In Washington, Cooper helped found important social, civic, and cultural institutions, and worked with other prominent clubwomen to unite hundreds of local and state groups into a national organization for Black women. In 1892, she published the book for which she would become most well known, A Voice from the South, by a Black Woman of the South. Often considered to be one of the most forceful and enduring statements of Black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century, Coopers A Voice from the South identifies how systems of oppression converged around issues of race, class, and gender to limit Black rights, freedom, opportunities, and life chances, and argues for the central place of Black women in the battle for civil and political rights. In 1925, Cooper became only the fourth Black woman in the US to earn her PhD, when she completed and defended her dissertation at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. In 1930, Cooper took on the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, a collection of community schools for working-class African Americans and remained active with the school until at least 1950. Cooper continued to write, edit, and publish well into her nineties. Through the efforts mainly of Black feminist scholars, Cooper is now regarded as one of the most important Black women intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her prescient insights and eloquent prose are recognized as underlying some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American social and political organizing. Cooper died in Washington, DC, on February 27, 1964, at the age of 105.

shirley moody-turner is an associate professor of English and African American Studies and founding co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk at Penn State University. She is the author of Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation and editor of African American Literature in Transition 19001910.

henry louis gates, jr. , is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center and theroot.com, and creator of the highly praised PBS documentary The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. He is general editor for a Penguin Classics series of African American works.

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Introduction, compilation, chronology, and suggestions for further reading copyright 2022 by Shirley Moody-Turner

General introduction copyright 2008 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Materials from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center appear with permission of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.

W. E. B. Du Bois correspondences to Anna Julia Cooper appear with permission of The David Graham Du Bois Trust and is from the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Special Collections and University Archives and the David Graham Du Bois Trust.

Materials from the Anna Julia Cooper Alumni File appear with permission from the Oberlin College Archives.

Materials from the Alice Dunbar-Nelson papers, University of Delaware Library appear with permission from the University of Delaware.

Materials from the Anna Julia Cooper Papers are archived at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia), 18581964, author. | Moody-Turner, Shirley, editor, writer of introduction. | Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., editor.

Title: The portable Anna Julia Cooper / Anna Julia Cooper ; edited and with an introduction by Shirley Moody-Turner ; general editor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Description: [New York, New York] : Penguin Books, [2022] | Series: Penguin classics | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021051069 (print) | LCCN 2021051070 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135067 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525506713 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia), 18581964Correspondence. | African American womenSouthern StatesHistory19th centurySources. | Southern StatesRace relationsSources.

Classification: LCC E185.86 .C5868 2022 (print) | LCC E185.86 (ebook) | DDC 370.92dc23/eng/20211108

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051069

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051070

Cover illustration: Makeba Rainey

Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

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