10/28/2025
Raleigh, North Carolina.
A baby girl was born into slavery. Her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, was enslaved. Her father was almost certainly her mother's enslaver—George Washington Haywood, a prominent white man, or possibly his brother.
The child was named Anna Julia Haywood. By the circumstances of her birth, she was property. The law said she had no rights, no future, no voice.
Anna Julia Cooper had other ideas.
When the Civil War ended and emancipation came, Anna was about seven years old. Suddenly, impossibly, she was free. And the first thing she wanted was education.
In 1868, St. Augustine's Normal School opened in Raleigh, established by the Episcopal Church to train Black teachers for the newly freed population. Anna enrolled immediately. She was brilliant, hungry to learn, and frustrated by limitations.
The school offered advanced courses—but only to male students. Women were expected to study just enough to become basic teachers or support their future husbands.
Anna thought that was ridiculous.
She demanded to take the advanced courses. The school initially refused. She pushed back. Eventually, they let her in—and she outperformed the male students. She graduated determined to keep going higher.
In 1881, at age 23, Anna enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio—one of the only institutions in America that admitted both women and Black students. She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1884, then returned for a master's degree in mathematics in 1887.
A Black woman. With two degrees in mathematics. In the 1880s.
That alone would have been extraordinary. Anna was just getting started.
She moved to Washington, D.C., and began teaching at the M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School). By 1902, she'd become principal—the first Black woman to lead the institution.
Under her leadership, M Street became legendary. It was the premier academic high school for Black students in America. Anna set impossibly high standards. She insisted her students study Latin, Greek, advanced mathematics, and classical literature. She prepared them for college when most of America assumed Black students were incapable of higher education.
Her students proved America wrong. M Street graduates went to Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and other top universities. They became doctors, lawyers, professors, leaders.
Anna's approach enraged racist school board members who believed Black students should be trained only for manual labor, not academics. In 1906, they forced her out as principal, fabricating charges to justify her removal.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept fighting.
In 1892, Anna had published "A Voice from the South"—one of the first books by a Black woman analyzing race and gender in America. In it, she wrote:
"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."
That sentence would echo through history. But in 1892, most of America wasn't listening.
Then, in her 60s—when most people would be thinking about retirement—Anna decided to earn a Ph.D.
She'd been pursuing doctoral studies part-time for years while teaching full-time and raising her adopted children (she'd taken in family members' children and raised them as her own). But American universities made it nearly impossible for a Black woman to complete a doctorate.
So in 1911, Anna went to Paris. She enrolled at the Sorbonne—one of Europe's most prestigious universities. She studied French history and culture while maintaining her teaching career in D.C., traveling back and forth across the Atlantic.
In 1924, at age 66, Anna defended her dissertation on French attitudes toward slavery during the French Revolution. In 1925, the University of Paris awarded her a Ph.D.
Anna Julia Cooper became the fourth African American woman ever to earn a doctoral degree—and she did it at 67, in a foreign language, while teaching full-time and raising children.
She didn't stop. She taught for another 15 years, finally retiring in her 80s. Then she started Frelinghuysen University, a night school for working Black adults in Washington, D.C. She served as its president until age 84.
Anna Julia Cooper lived to be 105 years old. She was born when slavery was still legal. She died in 1964—one year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
She witnessed the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, both World Wars, and the beginning of the movement that would finally dismantle legal segregation.
She lived long enough to see some of what she'd fought for. Not all of it. But some.
When she died on February 27, 1964, Anna Julia Cooper had spent 105 years proving that Black women's minds were as powerful as anyone's. That education was a right, not a privilege. That freedom was everyone's cause.
Today, her words—"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"—appear in United States passports, carried by millions of Americans traveling the world.
Most of those travelers have no idea who wrote those words. Most don't know about the woman born into slavery who earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne at 67. Most don't know about the principal who fought to give Black students a classical education when America said they should learn to be servants.
Anna Julia Cooper lived 105 years. She taught for over 60 of them. She fought for education, for women's rights, for racial justice, for human dignity.
And she did it all while America kept trying to make her disappear.
She was born property. She died one of the most educated women in America, with her words in every U.S. passport.
That's not just a remarkable life. That's a revolution lived one student, one degree, one refusal to be silenced at a time.
In honor of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), who was born enslaved and died free, educated, and impossible to ignore—even though history tried.
