Anna Julia Cooper

(c. 1858 - 1964)

Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper spent her life fighting for the rights and education of black women. She attended Oberlin College after the death of her husband, and received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in her sixties; the Anna Julia Cooper Center on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South at Wake Forest University is named in her honor. The U.S. passport features quotations from thirteen Americans, only one of which is by a woman: “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 and the very birthright of humanity.” The quotation is from Cooper’s speech “Woman Versus the Indian.”