Transcribe Cooper

Why Anna Julia Cooper?
Author. Educator. Activist.

Anna Julia Cooper, noted educator, civil rights activist, and author of the classic 1892 text, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, earned her PhD at the age of 66 and challenged the Jim Crow educational system in Washington, D.C.

A distinguished member of Washington, D. C.'s African American community, Anna Julia Cooper rose to prominence as a leading scholar, educator, and civil rights activist. Born into slavery in 1858, she became the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree when she received her PhD in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. In 1892 she penned one of the most forceful and enduring statements of black feminist thought to come of out of the nineteenth century, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, and she continued to write, work and publish until her death in 1964. In 1902 she waged what she refers to as the “courageous revolt” against Washington, DC’s segregated secondary curriculum, and continued to advocate for higher education for African Americans throughout her life. Through this project, we can begin to reconstruct the significance of Cooper’s writings and work which span from the end of Reconstruction to the dawning of the Civil Rights movement.

Join us in expanding access to Anna Julia Cooper's writings as we consider the broad sweep of national and local politics as reflected in one woman’s rich, but largely underappreciated archive.

Why engage with the materials?
To #CiteBLackWomen of the 19th century, we must #TranscribeBlackWomen

As we make #CiteBlackWomen center to our critical praxis, we take the opportunity during the celebration of Douglass Day to call forth the genius of Anna Julia Cooper. By making her writings digitally accessible, we allow future generations of thinkers to recognize the significance of her work for a modern world.

Our crowd-based transcription of Anna Julia Cooper’s writings is a way to honor the collaborative and multimodal nature represented in Cooper’s own collection. This work of recovery and reclamation sees her scholarship as a part of a larger African American public history project with the potential to reshape our understanding of Black political thought at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

While her 1892 text, A Voice from the South, stands as a monument to Cooper’s intellectual contributions and thought, much of her writing remained unpublished in her lifetime and is underexamined in ours. Now, by participating in Douglass Day 2020 - Transcribe Cooper, you can be part of bringing Anna Julia Cooper’s writing and work to digital life.