Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

The first step women took to improve their opportunities was through education. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, who was born into slavery, helped pioneer a path for educated black women when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1884. She published her first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, in 1892, wherein she voiced radical ideas of inclusion and equality.

Invited to speak on black women’s intellectual progress in 1893, Cooper stated, “We want to go to our homes from this Congress demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or sect, but a grand highway of humanity. The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal.” Later Cooper became a teacher and principal at the M Street Colored High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., where African American students gained a college preparatory education rather than vocational training.