An Educational Controversy: Anna Julia Cooper's Vision of Resolution Frances Richardson Keller

An educational controversy: Anna Julia Cooper's vision of resolution Frances Richardson Keller . NWSA Journal ; Baltimore Vol. 11, Iss. 3, (Fall 1999): 49-67.

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ABSTRACT Out of deep educational disagreements that tore black communities asunder in the nineteenth century, an African American woman offered solutions. Anna Julia Cooper pioneered one of the most significant innovations ever introduced in any society.

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An Educational Controversy: Anna Julia Cooper's Vision of Resolution

Out of deep educational disagreements that tore black communities asunder in the nineteenth century, an African American woman offered solutions. Anna Julia Cooper pioneered one of the most significant innovations ever introduced in any society. She envisioned and brought into being a system we know as community college. She championed and modeled the idea that higher education is a lifelong experience, that it can be available for everyone, and that everyone can work as she or he learns. Distressed by the "old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life" of far too many women, Anna Cooper demonstrated that women, as well as men, can escape ignorance and poverty. In her community she discovered, built, and nurtured a working-adult college; she believed that students need no longer feel thwarted in their life possibilities, that they could learn as they worked. As Booker Washington spoke for industrial education, W.E.B. Du Bois for elite opportunity, and Charles Chesnutt for the vote to achieve both, Anna Cooper offered higher education, vocational education, and lifelong education--and women's inclusion in them all--as the road to equal opportunity.

After the American Civil War a long, damaging controversy over the education of African American students took shape. Existing on many levels of society, and compounding the myriad of Reconstruction problems, the controversy drove deep rifts between African American leaders. Not so divisively, it engaged leaders of white communities. Beyond doubt, the fallout from that controversy affected every segment of American life from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

Could there have been a resolution of the deep educational disagreements of the black leaders? Through her work and her beliefs a little-sung black woman found ways to resolve the problems that troubled black educators. During her lifetime, in her philosophy, her teaching, and her writing, Anna Julia Cooper demonstrated that the convictions of the black leaders need not rend their communities asunder.

Though she was never recognized for the significance of this contribution, Cooper showed that the conflicts could be resolved. She championed opportunities for black students, believing that, especially in education, they must settle for no less than higher education in the liberal arts. At the same time, Cooper believed that the divergent philosophies of Booker Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles W. Chesnutt could be accommodated. She thought that African American students should avail themselves of the highest educational opportunities while

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 15 simultaneously paying the costs. Thus, she pioneered the idea that African Americans could support the costs of their educations as they learned. Anna Cooper developed innovative plans to make this combination of philosophies happen. They were plans taken up for the education of all people in the later widespread movement toward community colleges. She received little recognition for her service, and her views caused public controversy, the loss of her employment, and assaults on her character.

African American leaders publicly expressed and implemented widely divergent views about the problems of education for the former slaves. Though white leaders felt less divergent among themselves, they believed they had a stake in the education of black people. They thought it important to become involved. They acted in institutional fashion, guardedly, sometimes tentatively, sometimes defensively. Given the deplorable state of southern education in general and that of Negro education in particular, any improvement would seem desirable, however insufficient it might prove.

White businessmen set up several foundations to carry out their ideas. Among prominent white foundations, the Peabody, Slater and Jeans programs donated funds for Negro education, a cause later supported by the Caroline Phelps-Stokes Fund, by the Rosenwald Fund, and more extensively by the General Education Board and The Southern Education Board (Franklin 1974, 277-84). 1

Although the differences between black leaders were apparent, and although white leaders often expressed their views more subtly, white businessmen did lay out some of their concerns. The Reverend A. D. Mayob thought in 1888 that Southern resources could be developed if the working classes were sufficiently educated in the basic, necessary skills. Dexter Hawkins, a New York attorney, hoped that improving education in the South would finally make it possible for the South to bear its share of tax assessments. While black leaders disagreed among themselves about the kinds of programs desirable for black students, white spokesmen generally reached congenial positions. Motives were complex. While some were genuinely charitable, white policy makers agreed that a trained black labor force in the South would be necessary for social equilibrium as for business expansion, and that strictly vocational education for the black population would provide the solution (Franklin 1974, 280).

But black male leaders developed and laid out distinctly divergent patterns of thought and action for the education of black youth. 2 The programs they championed produced factions that persist to this day. Yet, in their day, Anna Julia Cooper may have discovered the only practical solutions for the long-term needs of African Americans. In doing so, she became a memorable representative of a distinguished group of black women writers, activists and educators, a group that included Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lucy Laney, and Mary Church Terrell.

Of the black male leaders of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Booker Washington spoke for those African Americans who thought it the first interest of the former slaves to improve economic positions, even though that meant delaying civil rights, delaying the suffrage, sanctioning menial work and, in the end, foregoing higher education. His views were based on the steady deterioration of black opportunity in the South as Reconstruction ended (for divergent interpretations see Coulter 1947; Woodward 1951). Though Washington never openly opposed higher education, his acceptance of separatism and his emphasis on vocational training came to a near exclusion of liberal arts experience from the education of black youth (Franklin 1974, 327-32). Washington supported education geared to the needs of industrialists. He founded an educational institution at Tuskegee to carry out his beliefs. Because of this, Washington exerted a wide influence in black circles and in white circles. Inadvertently or not, it seemed he spoke for those powerful whites who set up the foundations, and who desired a permanent black subservience, those who would benefit from the availability of a laboring, black underclass that would cherish few higher aspirations (Harlan 1972, 254-87; Washington 1988).

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W. E. B. Du Bois demanded higher education for African Americans with no delay and no discrimination; he spoke of a "talented tenth" (Du Bois 1961). 3 By this expression he referred to those black students who were being denied the superior education to which natural gifts should entitle them. In Philadelphia, and later at Atlanta University, he set an example of superb scholarship. 4 In time, Du Bois developed an international focus on black problems in education as in politics. He disagreed sharply with Washington's ideas; he referred to Washington's political activities as "manipulations" of Washington's "Tuskegee Machine."

Charles W. Chesnutt never underestimated the importance of opportunity for higher education. He thought, however, that the road to rectifying injustices in education as in other matters lay in insisting neither on vocational education, nor on immediate opportunities in liberal arts institutions. Chesnutt believed the suffrage to be the nearest road to basic civil rights, and therefore to educational advantages. If Negroes possessed the suffrage, Chesnutt believed they could open doors, including the entrances to institutions of higher learning. Chesnutt also came to think, however, that in every aspect of American life, in civil rights as in human rights, equality would finally be achieved through amalgamation of the races. Even though his family made connections at Tuskegee, Chesnutt disagreed with Washington and, to a lesser extent, with Du Bois. Thus he opposed the separatism of Washington and the positions some have called the elitism of Du Bois. Chesnutt thought blacks could achieve equality in education as in life by securing civil rights.

The three African American male leaders corresponded extensively with one another about the directions black education should take. They all spoke in public; they published books, articles and essays setting forth their views. They figured prominently in national debates. 5

But in this area of education, Anna Julia Cooper may have found the first, perhaps the only, resolution for dilemmas these differences implied. As she went about her writing and her teaching, she may have hoped to avoid open confrontation with the three male leaders. Beyond doubt, they ignored her views. 6

Yet the stressful circumstances of Cooper's life and the strength of her convictions made it impossible for her to escape consequences of these channels of thought of her time. As she pointed out, not the least significant of the black male leaders' views was the belief that young women needed less educational attention than young men (Fitch 1984; Giddings 1984, 87-88, 116, 210-12). Writing somewhat ruefully in A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, she noted that a boy of "meager equipment and shallow pretensions" would need only to declare his intentions to study theology. He would get scholarship help. But "A self-supporting girl," who wished to study the Greek language, would have "to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills and actually [would have] to fight her way against positive discouragements to the higher education" (Cooper 1970, 77). More generally, she also noted that

It strikes me as true that while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic.... I fear the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education. (75)

Indeed Cooper expressed admiration for both African American and white women who shattered the tradition of female ignorance and passivity. Though she regretted the interaction of certain white clubwomen after the Civil War (Cooper 1970, 80-91), she spoke with respect of the educator Mary Lyon; of Dorothy Dix, who pioneered reform in treating the mentally ill; of the abolitionist Lucretia Mott; and of Helen Hunt Jackson, passionate champion of the American Indian (48-79).

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 15 But Cooper particularly cherished her connections with women of her own race. She wrote with affection of the teachers Sarah Woodson Early and Martha Briggs; she mentioned nearly reverently the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, a "unique and rugged genius"; she spoke of the novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, of the anti-lynching journalist Ida Wells-Barnett, of her close friend Charlotte Forten Grimke, and of her colleague and classmate Mary Church Terrell (Cooper 1970, 128). She must have felt support and strength in the knowledge that Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Mary McLeod Bethune believed, as she did, that available liberal arts schools were of the utmost significance for the former slaves (Cooper 1970, 128; Giddings 1984, 199-215).

In dealing with the ideas of the black leaders for herself, her students and the five young relatives she adopted, Anna Julia Cooper thus became a trailblazer in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Though black male leaders ignored her, she conducted her own costly struggle. Cooper acted from the understanding that philosophies of education need not be mutually exclusive. Whether consciously or to some degree subconsciously, she began to demonstrate that approaches could be merged, could be enhanced, could be extended. Before the turn of the century she concluded that a fair share of life's opportunities would demand of African American peoples most of the proposed solutions most of the time, that at the least a fair share would require combining and extending in educational practice key elements of the beliefs of all the black male leaders. It also would require including and implementing the beliefs of the black female leaders.

How did this African American woman unite in her life and work the views of Washington, Du Bois, and Chesnutt, and the women of the black intellectual community? Through what struggle, through what pain did she channel her energies to develop a response of her own? What defeats did she suffer, what triumphs? As views of the male leaders split black communities asunder, how did Anna Cooper search and find practical solutions to racial dilemmas? I suggest that Cooper's life displayed the jagged circumstances through which a vision materialized and through which she fashioned viable patterns for African American education.

Cooper remained deeply involved in higher education for all of her long, active life. In the end, she succeeded in fusing the views of the black male leaders and she figured in the experience of the black female leaders. She added dimensions, especially dimensions of gender and of age. Cooper spoke poignantly of gender problems, those which confronted her and those which confronted all women of whatever color (Fitch 1984; Giddings 1984, 87-88, 116, 210-12). She also told of racial problems, for example of the difficulty of buying a house for the five young relatives she adopted. She looked to the development of her race; indeed, she looked toward a consonance of races. As nations struggled to surmount tensions of industrial escalation, and as black communities engaged in rending disagreements, Anna Cooper provided a model. She herself lived with excruciating problems of race and gender and age, but she developed a survival style. Demanding though it was, Cooper's style advanced realistic solutions for race and class and gender and age perplexities; Cooper's solutions even came to address the international racial tensions that beset an escalating technology (Cooper 1925; Keller 1988).

Born in 1858, Anna Julia Cooper was the daughter of Hannah Stanley Haywood, a slave belonging to Dr. Fabius J. Haywood. Though her paternity is uncertain, she believed Haywood to have been her father. Cooper lived to the age of 105; late in her life she remarked that she owed her father nothing. But she expressed love and gratitude toward her mother by giving the project she most cherished her mother's name (Washington Post, 29 February 1964; Williamson 1975). 7

While legal slavery in the United States had ended when Anna Cooper was a child of five, there was no escape from the effects of race prejudice. She grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time when legal white supremacy was replacing legal slavery throughout the South (Washington Post 1964). From early childhood till an advanced age, she struggled for her own education. Anna Cooper knew well the dreary legacy of American Negro slavery. Acutely

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 15 aware of the physical ravages that accompanied long hours of labor and scant nourishment, she understood the psychological injury for every individual and for her race as former white masters and captains of industry competed for power. She understood that the question "Who shall benefit from human labor?" had been and continued to be the pivotal concern (Cooper 1970, 102). 8

After slavery and the brief period of Reconstruction (Stampp 1966), she lived with the transference of the old slave status to the legal structure of the "New South." She knew violence. It had accompanied the fading of Reconstruction and the rise of secret societies (Franklin 1974, 262-3; Williamson 1975). She even knew the post- slavery consequences of sharecropping, of company dependency, of convict labor (Keller 1978, 193-7). From her late teens through her early twenties, she would have to have become aware of these situations, especially in summer teaching in North Carolina.

Talented and energetic, the young Anna had begun her work at age nine in the late-1860s (Harley 1978, 87). She became a student-teacher-tutor at the newly-organized Raleigh St. Augustine Episcopal School (Hutchinson 1981, 22-4). From that time on, she lived with the educational problems she would later address. Because of aptitudes in languages and in mathematics she next became a "scholarship-teacher." She received $100 per year, a small enough stipend even at that time (Hutchinson 1981, 22). Her own bent was toward classical studies. But Anna Cooper realized that basic skills in getting a living were everyone's first necessity. She knew that this was crucially important to the former slaves and it became so in her own career.

At nineteen, Cooper married the Reverend George Christopher Cooper. On the death of her young husband two years later, she decided to leave Raleigh to seek a higher degree at Oberlin College in Antioch, Ohio. She was then 21. At Oberlin, where she was one of three black women students (Gabel 1981, 24-33), she lived precariously on meager savings from her St. Augustine salary and on "the fruit of her own labor and self-denial" as a friend had noted in writing to Oberlin to help her secure admission (Hutchinson 1981, 35). 9

For a time at Oberlin she worked and studied in the home of a gifted teacher, Charles W. Churchill. Half a century later she wrote to his son that she had been "on my own and glad of every opportunity to eke out my slender savings by earning what I could in spare hours." 10 In 1892 she recalled those St. Augustine days. She had written that she had to "struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with [my] board bills" (Cooper 1870, 77; Washington 1988). Well before her Oberlin experience, Anna Cooper had remarked that at St. Augustine she even needed "to fight [my] way against positive discouragements to the higher education" (Cooper 1970, 76). She had observed that the only way a young woman like herself could study Greek was to marry a theology student (Hutchinson 1981, 29).

On a larger scale she came to understand that exploitation of farm labor and migration to cities made basic skills, as distinct from intellectual skills, an even more urgent requirement. Upon graduation from Oberlin in 1884, her first teaching assignment at Wilberforce University brought $1000 annually. 11 Though this was a larger sum than she had ever earned, it proved a small-enough reward for the heavy responsibilities she was expected to carry.

Because of Anna Cooper's hope for promotion and for additional funds, and because of her excellent record, she was able to move on to Washington, D.C., to teach in the only black college-preparatory high school, the M Street Washington Colored Highschool. 12 There she believed she would find opportunities.

Students were admitted to this school "on the basis of qualifications and performance" (Hutchinson 1981, 49). Although by the 1880s the school offered a two-year program in business and industrial training, it cherished a tradition of classical studies in its four-year liberal arts program (Gabel 1981, 47-59). Anna Cooper remained keenly

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 5 of 15 aware of her students' need to earn a living, and therefore of their need for vocational skills; but the most cherished of her goals became the thorough grounding of all pupils in college-preparatory liberal arts studies and the training of all pupils for service to their race.

Cooper's record book listed the occupations of her students' parents: laundress, porter, caterer, fireman, farmer, steward, grocer, waiter, barber, government messenger, dairyman, plasterer, shoemaker, assistant librarian, teacher, clergyman, housekeeper (Hutchinson 1981, 55). While Cooper never underestimated her students' need for such vocational skills as those which supported their parents, the curriculum she championed for these students consisted of the four-year college preparatory courses acceptable to Harvard, Yale, and Brown (Harley 1978, 92). By 1891 she was teaching four years of Latin, modern languages, and mathematics in this college preparatory curriculum. 13 By 1902 she had become principal. Her leadership lasted until 1906 (Hutchinson 1981, 81).

Before the 1890s, and in line with Booker Washington's beliefs, two institutions had come to dominate education for the former slaves. Hampton and Tuskegee had developed programs in trade education and household duties to the neglect of programs in classical studies. In the view of white financial concerns, North and South, such programs exactly met a desired outcome: they would maintain a black worker-class prepared for cheerful, permanent acceptance of menial service. With the advent of Booker Washington's persuasive talents, such programs had begun to gain wide acceptance among black educators, especially those educators financed by the white foundations. 14 Washington's behind-the-scenes activities brought many influential black leaders into line; his "Tuskegee Machine" became so powerful that it nearly controlled the job market over a wide spectrum of institutions (Harlan 1972, Ch. 13, 14; Franklin 1974, 284-90).

Because of obvious endowment, because of articulate abilities, and because she was principal of M Street, Anna Cooper was among those invited in 1894 to address a conference on black educational goals and methods; it was the second such conference held at Hampton Institute. There a group of scholars and educators gathered to discuss educational programs. Among the guests, Washington and Du Bois were prominent; the participants included many distinguished leaders. Among others attending were Kelly Miller, the Reverend Francis J. Grimke, T. Thomas Fortune, and Paul Laurence Dunbar (Hutchinson 1981, 60).

It is no surprise that Anna Cooper should have spoken in favor of vocational education; she had been close to privation herself. Her salary at the M Street Highschool was $750 per year. 15 She was also deeply committed to a struggle to develop her talents simultaneously in summer sessions at Columbia University where she had begun to earn credits toward a doctoral degree. 16

Anna Cooper knew well the value of ready skills. At the conference she said that she believed in industrial education with all her heart (Giddings 1984, 87-88, 101, 104-105). "We can't all be professional people," she said in her opening remarks. She continued:

We must have a back bone to the race.... There is a crisis ahead in the labor question. The foreign element is unstable, and restive, ready for strikes, and as a rule impatient of control. The people of this country will inevitably look around for a stable working class. When the time comes for the need to be appreciated and satisfied, the Negro must be ready to satisfy it; there will be no prejudice against the colored man as a worker. (Hutchinson 1981, 61)

When Anna Cooper uttered these words she could scarcely have guessed the depth of the personal crisis she would soon face; on this occasion her words expressed part of her conviction, though not the whole of it. From everything else that she said or wrote, we know that she never intended to suggest that the necessity to perform in

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 6 of 15 the market place as a worker or as a server should deny anyone access to higher education. Only two years before this time, Cooper had written in A Voice from the South that higher education ought always to be available to individuals who would profit from it. Cooper stresses the education of women, desiring for women what Thomas Jefferson desired for men (Cooper 1970, 48-79).

Cooper never opposed vocational education. She did oppose the elimination of liberal arts options for those whose aptitudes indicated them. The standards for choosing the path an individual should take must be based on natural talent, not color of skin. In practicing these principles, in insisting on retaining college preparatory studies, Anna Cooper was implementing for African American people the views that Thomas Jefferson had expressed for white people in the Notes on Virginia. Jefferson planned that higher education should be available and free for those who could benefit from it, writing that appropriate education should be available and free for all (Jefferson 1944, 266- 71).

Nor could Cooper have imagined the outcome of the revolt she was leading against lowering and nearly eliminating classical offerings for students at the M Street Highschool. In the very year after she became principal a controversy over the school curriculum of the M Street Highschool erupted. It raged in board meetings, in the public press, and in the Congress of the United States as it considered a bill revising curricula for Negro schools in the District of Columbia. 17 Part of this upheaval turned on courses to be offered, and part turned on whether a white supervisor should hold decisive power, and which white supervisor would be appointed (Hutchinson 1981, 61-83). 18

As principal of this school, Anna Cooper then led a revolt against the elimination of classical studies. Perhaps because of its visibility in the nation's capital, the M Street Colored Highschool had long been looked upon as a pilot school, a standard-bearing school, a school determining possibilities for the education of Negro youth. It was the largest college-preparatory school for Negro youth in the nation; its rolls included 361 students in 1888, the majority of them women students, and it presented these students with the specialized curriculum that would earn entrance to the country's most famous institutions (Gabel 1981, 53-54).

Indeed, its reputation had risen when in October of 1904 a distinguished professor, the Abbe Felix Klein, visited the M Street school. Upon his return to France, where he occupied a prestigious chair as Professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris, the Abbe Klein recorded his impressions of Anna Cooper's Latin class. He published a book titled Au Pays de "La Vie Intense." "What impressed me was the excellence of the explanation given by the teacher [Anna Cooper] on the purpose of the poem in general, on Virgil's design in relating history and mythology, on metre, rules of grammar and textual details," he wrote. "I would on my part have been quite incapable of such precision of knowledge and such pedagogical skill." Of the five college preparatory schools he visited, the Abbe Klein found the M Street Colored Highschool to be the most distinguished (Gabel 1981, 83-84). Clearly the educational possibilities at this institution flew in the face of the vocational philosophies Booker Washington had sold to many black and white leaders.

Yet Cooper never underestimated the importance of Washington's vocational competence or of Chesnutt's civil rights. Nor did she ever consider the denial of higher education to young women or to black Americans. These were the sticking points. In fact, Anna Cooper successfully prepared M Street students for admission to Harvard, Brown, and Yale Universities at the height of the controversy that targeted her (Harley 1978, 92-93). She won the battle to retain liberal arts courses at M Street (Gabel 1981, 93-102).

But through the turbulent years from 1902 to 1906 in which she served as principal, Cooper endured every kind of opprobrium, as well as public and private attempts to undermine her work and to remove her influence. At the peril

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 7 of 15 of her reputation and, finally, at the cost of her position as principal, Cooper held to the conviction that M Street students should be permitted to choose college preparatory courses (Gabel 1981, 93-102). The final outcome was that two high schools were established: one to be vocational, the other to be college preparatory. The name of the original school was changed to the Dunbar Highschool.

For her courage and her tenacity, Cooper endured clandestine efforts to belittle her, as well as attacks upon her ability and her character so damaging that the board finally, in 1906, declined to renew her appointment as principal (Gabel 1981, n.50). Cooper commented on this watershed moment in her life. She wrote in a letter to her Oberlin classmates that "The dominant forces of our country are not yet tolerant of the higher steps for colored youth, so that while our course of study was for the first time being saved, my head was lost in the fray and I moved west" (Harley 1978, 95). In the heat of battle Cooper championed and practiced the only practical answers to questions about directions for black education. Here were solutions the black male leaders sought but could not see. As Washington spoke for industrial education, Du Bois for elite opportunity and Chesnutt for the vote to achieve both, Anna Cooper offered higher education and vocational education and lifelong education, and women's inclusion in them--as the road to equal opportunity.

So Cooper lost a personal war. She was dismissed from the M Street school. Certainly her stand for liberal arts in education precipitated her dismissal, though her insistence on equal educational opportunities for girls may well have played some part. While she was fighting for reinstatement, she was chairperson of the Department of Language at Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri. Four years later, and at the invitation of a new superintendent, she returned to the M Street school, not as principal, but as a teacher. 19 Upon her return, she was definitely downgraded in influence. She could scarcely have escaped feelings of humiliation and feelings of a loss of prestige in the eyes of former colleagues and new members of the teaching staff.

But Anna Cooper never ceased fighting for the views she had defended. Her 1892 book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, had expressed the beliefs she had championed and had piloted the new directions in education for which she had now become notorious (Carby 1987, 96-108, 114-117). It had added dimensions of gender and dimensions of race to educational concerns. Her sin was that as principal she had struggled to actualize these views.

Cooper had long cherished the hope of attaining the doctoral degree. Upon returning to M Street, her quest to succeed in this endeavor must have taken on a new insistency. She had been spending summers in acquiring the necessary credits from Columbia University. Developing a gift for languages, she had become interested in modern languages as well as classical languages, and in modern literature. In 1900 and subsequently, she had traveled in Europe, especially in France. She had taken courses in Paris at La Guilde Internationale. On her later travels she had journeyed to the Pan-African Congress in London, 20 visited many countries from the British Isles to the Mediterranean, seen the Passion Play in Oberammergau and attended the World Exposition in Paris (Gabel 1981,104). She had expanded her horizons and elevated her goals.

Finally she was able to make arrangements with the Sorbonne to transfer credits from Columbia courses and from studies at La Guilde Internationale. For the doctorate from the Sorbonne, she wrote essays the examiners required: "Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement" and "Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States"; 21 and she wrote in French a remarkable thesis, "L'Attitude de la France a l'egard de l'esclavage pendant la revolution," an original and daring interpretation of the French Revolution in its relation to world slavery (Cooper 1925). 22

At the age of 67, she appeared at "the awesome portals of the Salle Du Doctorat" of the University of Paris, there to

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 8 of 15 defend her dissertation. 23 Having obtained a leave from her teaching position in Washington (because she had been ill with influenza) she had sent ahead her transcript of credits from Columbia University and boarded a ship for France.

Upon arrival at Paris she had disclosed her intention to put in the additional required year's residence there. She had taken special examinations. She had braved bureaucracies. She had completed innumerable "preliminary" arrangements, only to learn by cable that it was "[R]umored you will be dropped if not back in 60 days." Her friends the Abbe Klein and M. Deschamel, a former professor at La Guilde, had provided support and guidance so that she had found a "collabatrice" whom she could employ to copy materials from the Archives and forward them to her at the Library of Congress. She had realized that if she did not at once return to Washington she would have lost her job and "all hope of future security on retiring." Feeling herself "a desperate Cinderella," she had returned to Washington, to her teaching position, and to the making of still further arrangements to go back to Paris for the defense of her work when it should be completed--"if I have to swim." 24

Cooper began her writing by "plugging away every leisure moment." She wrote full-time during summer vacation and all holidays at the Library of Congress. She became the embodiment of the educational ideas she had championed, for she achieved her doctoral degree in spite of every obstacle, whether contrived, financial, physical, or geographical. She did it by earning her daily bread under these most impeded circumstances--even threats of dismissal from her teaching position--and by simultaneously striving for excellence in the highest intellectual pursuits.

What philosophy for African American education did Anna Cooper embrace over the long period of her life as the bitterest of controversies raged, then for many years after she retired from M Street-Dunbar? A project that she cherished after her retirement from M Street was her involvement in Freylinghuysen, an adult-education university for employed colored persons.

The Freylinghuysen concept was, in Cooper's words, "an innovation of American education." It best expressed the mission of her life and beliefs. It began on or about April 27th, 1906, under the aegis of a group of black citizens as "a campaign for the education and social salvation of the unreached." The organizers, among whom Professor Jesse Lawson was prominent, meant to take educational advantages to working people. They intended to design schools "to provide social services, religious training and educational programs for the people who needed them the most." Freylinghuysen University existed many years, not as "a campus with a network of buildings" but as a group of schools that would reach out to the poorest residents of Washington, D. C. So positive were responses to the new opportunities that the promoters of the Freylinghuysen concept began to develop plans to expand programs in higher education, to offer university training to those who could otherwise afford no such possibilities (Hutchinson 1981, 155-73).

More than any other evidence, this venture demonstrates Cooper's deep commitment to providing opportunities in higher education for working class black men and black women. For this working peoples' university there were no questions of age or sex discrimination. Cooper worked with this project for many years; beginning in 1930 she played a vital role as president. Beyond doubt, this endeavor, conducted over a period of some 40 years, presaged the community college and state college systems of a later day, in which many black and white students work as they learn. For thirty-odd years--circa 1907 to 1942--Cooper was among those who shepherded this venture; for its later sessions, she provided space in her home for a University Center. 25 Though eventually it closed, Freylinghuysen offered employed adult African American students standard college level courses, as well as graduate courses in law and religion. In 1942 at the age of 84, Cooper retired from Freylinghuysen. On this occasion, she expressed the views she had practiced. She said, "We rededicate ourselves to ... belief in the efficacy

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 9 of 15 of Education to make life livable as well as to make a living in America today under the Constitution." 26 This was her answer to the disagreements, the separate educational channels, of the black male leaders.

Perhaps she best expressed her common-sense, ground-breaking convictions about education in a letter printed in the Oberlin College Alumni Review in 1909:

As for me, I stand on the double foundation-stone of our Alma Mater--"Labor and Learning"--unrestricted and harmonious, without clash and without cliques,--simply, for my people and for all people a man's chance to earn a living not dissociated from man's first right and highest prerogative--to live. 27

I appreciate the expert assistance of Diane Valencia and Joan Lafler in formatting this essay.

Frances Richardson Keller is an Americanist specializing in women's history and race relations in American experience. Her published work includes An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt; Anna Julia Cooper: Slavery and the French Revolutionists (trans., ed., and essay); Views of Women's Lives in Western Tradition (ed. and contributor); and The Fictions of History (forthcoming). Keller now writes and lectures in these areas after retiring from The Institute for Historical Study at San Francisco State University.

Notes

1. Other foundations were the Robert C. Ogden, H. H. Rogers, Collis P. Huntington, Andrew Carnegie and William Baldwin Foundations. All assisted education substantially; for African Americans particularly there was assistance in vocational education.

2. The best concise delineation of these positions in the words of their originators can be found in Booker T. Washington, et al., The Negro Problem [1903] 1970. Chesnutt and DuBois reached some conclusions in later life that they do not touch upon in these essays, however. DuBois intensified his international emphasis after the first Pan-African conference at the close of World War I. Chesnutt's positions on race amalgamation can be found in many sources, clearly in "Race Prejudice, Its Causes and Cures," (unpublished ms., Charles W. Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 5, 12, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51). See also Charles W. Chesnutt, "The Future American: What the Race Is Likely To Become in the Process of Time," Boston Transcript, 18 August 1900; "The Future American: A Stream of Dark Blood in the Veins of the Southern Whites," Boston Transcript, 25 August 1900; "The Future American: A Complete Race Amalgamation Likely To Occur," Boston Transcript, 1 September 1900. Booker Washington's views are assembled in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, especially volume III.

3. This volume is the Du Bois manifesto, in which his views on the "talented tenth" are first set forth in Ch. VI, "On the Training of Black Men." Du Bois is thought to have originated this term.

4. The Philadelphia Negro (several volumes) and The Atlanta University Studies, of which Du Bois was editor 1898- 1914, are enduring examples. All available at Atlanta University Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. Du Bois also wrote some 23 volumes of studies and novels and edited The Crisis, official organ of the NAACP. He was responsible for more than 100 articles.

5. For discussion amplifying and differentiating the three positions of the black leaders, see Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1978, 214-226, 249-256).

6. There are very few letters discussing approaches to racial problems between the black leaders and Anna

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 10 of 15 Cooper; mostly they appear to be one-way letters from Cooper to DuBois and to Chestnutt. See Aptheker 1997. Cooper's views were generally ignored by the black male leaders.

7. The two most important monographic studies of Cooper's life are Louise Daniel Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1981), and Leona C. Gabel, From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life and Writings of Anna J. Cooper (1981). Professor Gabel died before she was able to publish this manuscript. It is held in the Smith College Archives, Northampton, Massachusetts.

8. The passage from which this material is drawn begins with the words "For two hundred and fifty years he [the white slave owner] trained to his hand a people whom he made absolutely his own in body, mind and sensibility." The passage elaborates on this theme.

9. Dr. Medes to President Fairchild, 10 September 1981. This is a letter recommending Anna Cooper for financial assistance at Oberlin College. Cooper did receive a very small stipend.

10. Anna Julia Cooper to Alfred J. Churchill, 2 January 1949. Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.

11. Transcripts at Oberlin College show that "Anne [sic] Julia Cooper was admitted to the sophomore class with conditions that were promptly removed. The record for her three undergraduate years is excellent." The transcripts also show that the B.A. degree was granted in 1887. The M.A. was given next; this was a general practice for bachelors of art who have been engaged in literary or scientific pursuits, and who "have sustained a good moral character." Cooper taught at Wilberforce for one year only, 1884-1885.

12. For a brief time after Wilberforce, Cooper returned to Raleigh and to the St. Augustine School (1886-1888). She found this insufficiently challenging, however.

13. The Abbe Felix Klein, a professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, France, once visited the M Street Highschool as an observer. Upon talking with Principal Cooper and then recording his impressions of her Latin class, Abbe Klein wrote that "there was one thing certain and that was the excellence of the explanations the Professor gave." He also mentioned that he had seen "530 young negroes and negresses, [sic] well dressed and well bred, under teachers of their own race, pursuing the same studies as our average college students" (Hutchinson 1981, 58-59).

14. In particular, the Southern Education Board, functioning under the General Education Board, became a clearing house for the allocation of funds to such institutions as Hampton and Tuskegee.

15. At this time Cooper also may have been contributing to the support of her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood.

16. Transcripts for Anne [sic] J. Cooper are held at Columbia University, New York. They show the time periods over which Anna Julia Cooper worked toward her doctoral degree; they illustrate her long personal involvement with theories about education and demonstrate how she came to them.

17. It is difficult to trace the interactions of this bitter controversy over leadership and course offerings in the educational system. But some newspaper accounts have survived and are held in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C., some bearing dates 1894-1896, some undated. A letter from Charles Busbee to Washington, D.C. Board of Education dated 11 September 1905 also documents the struggle.

18. Hutchinson's detailed account of the maneuverings, undercover manipulations, and unfounded attacks upon

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 11 of 15 Cooper's character documents Cooper's dismissal and is the best explanation of these events.

19. The new Superintendent of the Washington School System who arranged Cooper's reappointment as a teacher was Dr. W. A. Davidson.

20. Du Bois engineered this conference; it became the launch-platform for new directions in African American thought.

21. Cooper translated both of these 1925 essays--the first in 1941, the second in 1945--from French to English for use in her classes in her later venture, Freylinghuysen University. These documents are held in the Moorland- Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

22. The French title of this work is L'Attitude de la France a l'egard de l'esclavage pendant la revolution; in translation, Slavery and the French Revolutionists 1785-1808, Frances Richardson Keller, tr., ed., and interpretive essay (1988, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press). Though the Sorbonne published this thesis in 1925 in the French in which it was written, it was never published in Cooper's native land in any language until 1988.

23. Anna J. Cooper, "The Third Step" (Autobiographical). Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 3-4.

24. Cooper, 6, 10.

25. Cooper, 7-11.

26. This quotation is from "Farewell Address," printed on an invitation to the Lincoln-Douglass Day program of 1942; quoted in Hutchinson 1981, 185.

27. From Class Letters of Oberlin College (1909); quoted in Gabel 1981. The use of "man" here is ironic--but generic, in accordance with custom of that time.

References

Aptheker, Herbert. 1997. The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Carby, Hazel. 1987. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. 1901. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

------. (1903) 1970. "The Vote." In The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, Booker T. Washington, et al. New York: AMS Press.

Cooper, Anna Julia. (1892) 1970. A Voice from the South. Authorized facsimile. Ann Arbor, MI: The Aldine Printing Press.

------. 1925. L'Attitude de la France a l'egard de l'esclavage pendant la revolution. Paris: Imprimerie de la Sorbonne.

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 12 of 15 Coulter, E. Merton. 1947. The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1961. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications.

Fitch, Nancy Elizabeth. 1984. "Anna Julia Cooper, Ph.D.: Community Leader and Educator." Paper presented at the Sixth Annual Berkshire Conference, Smith College, Northampton, MA, 2 June.

Franklin, John Hope. 1974. From Slavery to Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Gabel, Leona C. 1981. From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life and Writings of Anna J. Cooper. Unpublished manuscript in Smith College Archives, Northampton, MA.

Harlan, Louis R., ed. 1972. The Papers of Booker T. Washington. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Harley, Sharon. 1978. "Anna J. Cooper, A Voice for Black Women." In The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, eds. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1944. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and Walter Peden. New York: Random House of the Modern Library.

Keller, Frances Richardson. 1978. An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press.

------. 1988. Slavery and the French Revolutionists [by Anna Julia Cooper]. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Stampp, Kenneth. 1966. The Era of Reconstruction. New York: Knopf.

Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. 1978. "A Voice for Black Women." In The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, eds. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.

Washington, Booker T. 1907. Up From Slavery. London: Moring.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed. 1988. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South [by Anna Julia Cooper]. New York: Oxford-Schomberg Series.

Williamson, Joel. 1975. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861-1877. New York: The Norton Library.

Woodward, C. Vann. 1951. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Photo (Anna Julia Cooper)

DETAILS

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 13 of 15 Subject: Personal profiles; Women; Blacks; Community colleges; History; African Americans; Black culture; Culture; Education; Interest groups; Lobbying; Lobbyists; Minority ðnic groups; Politics; Teachers

Literature indexing term: Author: Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 1858-1932; Author: Cooper, Anna J. (Anna Julia), 1858-1964

People: Cooper, Anna J (Anna Julia) (1858-1964) Chesnutt, Charles Waddell (1858-1932)

Publication title: NWSA Journal; Baltimore

Volume: 11

Issue: 3

Pages: 49-67

Publication year: 1999

Publication date: Fall 1999

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Place of publication: Baltimore

Country of publication: United States, Baltimore

Publication subject: Women's Interests

ISSN: 10400656

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Journal Article

Document feature: Photo

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.1999.0038

Accession number: SFLNSFNWS0400NWDZ576000005

ProQuest document ID: 233239199

Document URL: https://eznvcc.vccs.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly- journals/educational-controversy-anna-julia-coopers-vision/docview/233239199/se- 2?accountid=12902

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Database: Social Science Premium Collection,Research Library

LINKS

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