Among the most outstanding African-American educators of the post-reconstruction era of the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century were Dr. Anna Julia Cooper and Ms. Nannie Helen Burroughs. During this extremely difficult and rocky period for African-Americans these dedicated sisters were confronted with the arduous tasks of struggling for racial uplift, economic justice and social equality.
Anna Julia Cooper (the eldest of the two women) was born Anna Julia Haywood on August 10, 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of an enslaved African woman, Hannah Stanley, and her White master. From early on Cooper possessed an unrelenting passion for learning and a sincere conviction that Black women were equipped to follow intellectual pursuits. This thinking ran strongly against the popular opinion of the day. To the contrary, Cooper later said that “not far from kindergarten age” she decided to become a teacher. In Cooper’s words, speaking on the lack of the emphasis on formal education for Black girls, “Not the boys less, but the girls more.” In 1867 Cooper entered St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh. In 1925, at the age of sixty-seven, she earned a Ph.D. from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, becoming only the fourth African-American woman to obtain such a degree. At the tender age of 105, after a lifetime of educating African-American youth, Dr. Cooper died peacefully in her home in Washington, D.C.
Although exceptionally brilliant Anna Julie Cooper was not an isolated phenomenon. Nannie Helen Burroughs, another remarkable sister, was born on May 2, between 1879 to 1883 in Orange, Virginia, to John and Jennie Burroughs. Nannie Helen Burroughs, described as a “majestic, dark-skinned woman,” was only twenty-one years old when she became a national leader, catapulted to fame after presenting a dynamic speech entitled “How the Sisters are Hindered from Helping” at the annual conference of the National Baptist Convention in Richmond, Virginia in 1900.