2. Anna Julia Cooper (America)
Anna Julia Cooper when she graduated. Photo Credit: Caribbean Philosophical Association
Born in to slavery in 1858, Anna Julia Cooper went on to become a famous American Black liberation activist, sociologist, educator, speaker, and author. She was the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree and a prominent member of Washington D.C.’s African-American community.
Cooper was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Hannah Stanley Haywood, an enslaved woman in the house of Wake County landowner George Washington Haywood. It’s not clear who Cooper’s father was, but some records suggest that it could be George or his brother Fabius J. Haywood.
In the early 1890s, Cooper participated in many anti-slavery movements, including the weekly “Saturday Nighters” salon of Black Washingtonians, Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade, and several anti-slavery causes, among others. She also founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 and became the only woman elected to the American Negro Academy in 1893. Cooper died in 1964.
