Surely, Anna Julia Cooper fits the criteria of Maya Angelou’s phenomenal woman which reads in part:

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally

Cooper was truly a phenomenal woman- the representative woman of her era par excellence- a public intellectual and activist of the first order. Her writing and social teachings on black women laid the basis for the modern black feminist movement and served as a corrective for male dominated leadership in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Writing as early as 1892, Cooper asserted, “With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loose from her hands and set to work.

Moreover, her writings are central and essential to understanding the importance of having the correct orientation and practice of male and female relationships, and to realizing the full potential inherent in the union of men and women engaged in family life and social struggle. More than ever, her views on American social thought and practice is needed today as a corrective force for the misguided and destructive voices on the right and the timid voices on the left.  Cooper viewed the relationship between men and women as complementary opposites within a greater whole. For her, the duality of male female relationships interacted as a unified whole, giving balance to each opposite gender.

To be sure, Cooper was a race-woman who believed deeply in the unique vocation of black women. At the beginning of the 20^th century she argued that black women were uniquely position to assume the role of the moral vanguard because of the “black woman’s moral superiority to white civilization, whose ‘blasé world-weary look characterized the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak seen their best days.”  Women she believed were part of the rising tide of history. “To be a woman in such an age,” she opined, “carries with it privilege and an opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America is to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibility of the crisis, is to have a heritage seems to me, unique in the ages.

The current political and social situation today, resembles much of the climate in the early 20^th century, exactly one hundred year ago. The political retrenchment of civil rights and economic gains by African Americans, the immigrant bashing, the vitriolic and racist rhetoric of the rightwing, the resentment and anxieties of the poor and working class whites, and the mass incarceration of African American males.

The condition of black males in America has reached perhaps their second nadir. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes in her new book, the New Jim Crow, that: “the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or labeled felons for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prison or trapped in a permanent, second-class status-much like their grandparents before them who live under an explicit system of control.” Hence, Anna Julia Cooper’s voice is as relevant today as it was one hundred years ago. In this moment of crisis for African Americans and America, Cooper’s views and writing are instructive, and essential to avoiding the current decent into chaos and barbarism.

The Teaching of Anna Julia Cooper

Interconnectedness and interdependence and Sanctity of Male and Female Relationships

All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements-complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

The necessity of the integration of male and female in making whole men and women

There is a general consensus of mankind that the one trait is masculine and the other is peculiarly feminine. That both are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance. In short, Cooper saw the unity of male and female relationships was a moral force giving a necessary balance to life, stating: That, as both (male  and female relationships) are alike necessary in giving symmetry to the individual, so a nation or a race will degenerate into mere emotionalism on one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively; lastly, and most emphatically, that the feminine factor can have its proper effect only through women’s development and education so that she may fitly and intelligently stamped force on the forces of her day, and add her modicum t the riches of the world’s thought.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

The Importance of Education

Now I claim that it is the prevalence of the higher Education among women, the making it a common everyday affair for women to reason and think and express their thoughts, the training and stimulus which enable and encourage women  administer to the world the bread it needs was well as the sugar it cries for; in short it is the transmitting the potential forces of her soul into dynamic factors that has given symmetry and completeness to the world’s agencies. Our meager and superficial results form past efforts prove their futility; and every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

Honoring what is worthy

We too often mistake individual’s honor for the development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose. The Negro is constitutionally hopeful and proverbially irrepressible; and naturally stands in danger of being dazzled by the shimmer and tinsel of superficial. We often mistake foliage for fruit and overestimate or wrongly estimate brilliant results. We need men who can let their interest and gallantry extend outside the circle of their aesthetic appreciation, men who can be a father, a brother, and a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl.  We need women who are so sure of their won social footing that they need not fear learning to lend a hand to a fallen or falling sister. We need men and women who do not exhaust their genius splitting hairs on aristocratic distinctions and thanking god they are not as others, but earnest , unselfish souls, who can to into the highways and byways, lifting up and leading.”

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

Black Women as the rising tide of history

To be a woman in such an age to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages. In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth.  All its achievements are before it. It does not look on the mastery triumphs of nineteenth century civilization with that blasé world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days.

Status of Women in America
A Voice from the South

The success or ruin of a people begins in the family

A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is about a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the part will determine the characteristics of the whole. Whatever the attainment of the individual may be, unless his home has moved on pari passu, he can never be regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

A race can only achieve progress through its own internal strengths and efforts

A race cannot be purified from without. Preachers and teachers are helps and stimulants and conditions as necessary as the gracious rain and sunshine are to plant growth. But what are the rain and dew and sunshine and clouds if there be no life in the plant germ. We must go to the root and see that that is sound and healthy and vigorous; and not deceive ourselves with waxen flowers and painted leaves of mock chlorophyll. Everything to this race is new and strange and inspiring. There is a quickening of its pulse and a glowing of its self-consciousness. Aha, I can rival that1 I can aspire to that! I can honor my name and vindicate my race! Something like this, it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which sirs, the genius of young Africa in America.

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

The focus of uplift of African Americans begins with the masses with a priority on women

Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phoebus warms” the valleys. We must point to the homes, average homes, homes of the rank and file of horny handed toiling men and women of the South (where the masses are) lighted and cheered by the good, the beautiful, and the true,-them and not till then will the whole plateau be lifted into the sunlight. I am my sister’s keeper! should be the hearty response of every man and woman of the race, and their conviction should purify and exalt the narrow selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.