Black Women Warriors during Jim Crow organized assistance for their communities while also speaking publicly for Black and women's rights.
Anna Julia Cooper
'I am my Sister's keeper!' should be the hearty response of every man and woman of [our] race." Anna Julia Cooper was an educator, activist, and feminist.
Cooper was born enslaved in North Carolina in 1858, but soon gained freedom thanks to the Civil War. Her mother was determined for her child to have the freedom to learn how to read and write, a right denied her under slavery. 📚📚 She and Mary Church Terrell graduated together from the "gentlemen's course" at Oberlin College with Bachelor's degrees in 1884. 🙏🏾 🙏🏾 A white man doesn't always mean all he says in a book." After training as a teacher, she became principal at M Street High School in Washington, D.C. (the same school Terrell had taught at) in 1901. 👩🏾🏫 👩🏾🏫 The white men that supervised the school believed that Black kids only needed enough education to prepare themselves to be servants, farmers, construction workers, or other laborers.
Anna Julia Cooper knew many of her brilliant students deserved to go onto college, and she ignored the rules. She offered advanced classes to her Black students so they could get the same education as white students and be prepared for college. Many of her students did go on to earn college degrees. 👩🏽🎓 👩🏽🎓 Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society." In 1892, Cooper wrote what is often considered the first Black feminist text, A Voice from the South, which describes what life was like for women and what she hoped for Blacks and women in the future. 📝 Many quotes from that book sound like they could have been said today! 🔥🔥
Cooper helped Mary Church Terrell start the Colored Women's League in 1894, and their club did much work to support the community. She helped start a "Social Settlement," which provided education, food, and housing for poor Blacks. In 1930, she became president of Frelinghuysen University, which educated impoverished Black adults. 💪🏾 💪🏾 The cause of freedom is...the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity." Cooper died In 1954, months before Brown v. Board of Education officially ended school segregation. 🖤🖤
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Mary Church Terrell
I will not shrink from undertaking what seems wise and good because I labor under the double handicap of race and sex." Mary Church Terrell was born in Tennessee in 1863 to formerly enslaved parents. Her father was an ambitious businessman who eventually became one of the richest Blacks in America. Her mother owned her own hair salon.
Terrell was sent to a private school in Ohio to get the best education possible. She and Anna Julia Cooper then graduated together from the "gentlemen's course" at Oberlin College with Bachelor’s degrees in 1884. 🙏🏾 🙏🏾 Her upper-class father expected Terrell to be a lady and stay at home, but she was determined to have a profession and teach. In 1886, she began teaching at M Street High School in DC, where Anna Julia Cooper would later teach, and where Terrell met her husband. 👩🏾🏫 👩🏾🏫 While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach." In 1892, the lynching of her friend Tom Moss, who ran the successful People's Grocery Store in Memphis, sparked Terrell to become more political and she began speaking out about lynching, along with Ida B. Wells. With Anna Julia Cooper, she started the Colored Women's League in 1894, then became the president of the National Association of Colored Women. ✊🏾✊🏾
It's due to groups like this that the 1890s are called "the Women's Era." Terrell's group supported the Black community by starting kindergartens and nurseries so Black women did not have to worry about their children while working. Terrell spoke publicly about Black's rights, particularly the rights of women and incarcerated men. 🔥🔥 Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States." Starting in 1898, Terrell began giving speeches across America and the world to women's groups. In her speeches, she shared details of Black life and culture in America, explaining the special talents of Black women along with the especially cruel oppression they faced. She impressed women in Berlin in 1904 by giving her speeches in English, German, and French. ✊🏾✊🏾
Terrell was the first Black woman to join the Washington, DC, school board, which she served on from 1895 to 1901, and then again from 1906 to 1911. She also helped W.E.B. Dubois start the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 💪🏾 💪🏾 We look forward to a future large with promise and hope....[We] knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance." After supporting the right of women to vote, in 1920, the Republican National Committee hired Terrell to convince women's groups on the East Coast to join the Republican Party, which at the time, was the political party most Blacks supported. 🗳️ 🗳️
In the early 1950s, she participated in Civil Rights sit-ins and and boycotts in DC. ✊🏾✊🏾 Terrell lived to see the desegregating of school through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, before passing away a few months later. 🖤🖤 |
Ida B. Wells
One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap." Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, teacher, and activist.
Wells was born enslaved in Mississippi in 1862 and was emancipated during the Civil War. Her parents, before dying of yellow fever when Wells was 16, taught her that education was critical to life success. To help support her siblings, she moved them to Memphis, TN and became a teacher. 👩🏾🏫 👩🏾🏫 Wells believed in always speaking her mind and sticking up for herself. In 1884, when Black women had almost no rights, she sued the Southwestern Railroad Company for making her move to a smoking car even though she paid for a first class ticket. 🔥🔥 Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation?" Shortly after, she began writing for Black newspapers such as Free Speech, in which she was very open about her opinions and criticism of America for allowing lynchings and other forms of racism. She was called in her field the "Princess of the Press." ✏️ ✏️
Wells became even more fiery in 1892 after a friend she shared with Mary Church Terrell, Tom Moss, was lynched. She wrote clearly about rising up in violence against whites if violence against Blacks continued. She had to flee the South after that to avoid being killed. 🔥🔥 A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give." From New York, Chicago, and even Europe, she continued to write and give speeches to educate whites about the horrible violence Blacks faced in the South. Women's Clubs like that of Mary Church Terrell raised money to get Wells' pamphlets, such as Southern Horrors, printed and distributed. ✊🏾✊🏾
Our country's national crime is lynching." Settling in Chicago after getting married, she opened her own women's club and settlement house, much like Anna Julia Cooper. The club raised money for a kindergarten and the settlement offered education, job training, and a cheap place to live for Blacks in the community. 💪🏾 💪🏾
Along with Mary Church Terrell and W.E.B. Dubois, Wells helped start the National Advancement of Colored People in the early 1900s. 💪🏾 💪🏾 Unfortunately, Wells passed in 1931 due to kidney disease. 🖤🖤 |
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Bibliography
Anna Julia Cooper
Cooper, Anna J. A Voice from the South: by a Black Woman of the South. DocSouth Books Edition. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Library, 2017 (original 1892).
---. "The Humor of Teaching." Crisis, Vol. 37, no. 10, November 1930, pp. 387, 393-94.
---. "The Life of Anna Julia Cooper: A Chronology." The voice of Anna Julia Cooper: including A voice from the South and other important essays, papers, and letters, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998, pp. 345-346.
Johnson, Karen A. "The Antioppressionist Thoughts and Pedagogies of Anna Julia Cooper and Septima Poinsette Clark." Black Female Teachers: Diversifying the United States' Teacher Workforce, edited by Abiola Farinde-Wu and Ayanna Allen-Handy, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2017, pp. 59-81.
Cooper, Anna J. A Voice from the South: by a Black Woman of the South. DocSouth Books Edition. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Library, 2017 (original 1892).
---. "The Humor of Teaching." Crisis, Vol. 37, no. 10, November 1930, pp. 387, 393-94.
---. "The Life of Anna Julia Cooper: A Chronology." The voice of Anna Julia Cooper: including A voice from the South and other important essays, papers, and letters, edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998, pp. 345-346.
Johnson, Karen A. "The Antioppressionist Thoughts and Pedagogies of Anna Julia Cooper and Septima Poinsette Clark." Black Female Teachers: Diversifying the United States' Teacher Workforce, edited by Abiola Farinde-Wu and Ayanna Allen-Handy, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2017, pp. 59-81.
Mary Church Terrell
*Add piece from my book
Gallagher, Charles A., and Cameron D. Lippard. Race and Racism in the United States : An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Greenwood, 2014.
Knisley, Kendra. "Lifting as We Climb: The Life of Mary Church Terrell." Berkshire Museum, 14 May 2023, https://explore.berkshiremuseum.org/digital-archive/she-shapes-history/lifting-as-we-climb-the-life-of-mary-church-terrell.
Smith, Jessie Carney, and Shirelle. Phelps. Notable Black American Women. Gale.
*Add piece from my book
Gallagher, Charles A., and Cameron D. Lippard. Race and Racism in the United States : An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Greenwood, 2014.
Knisley, Kendra. "Lifting as We Climb: The Life of Mary Church Terrell." Berkshire Museum, 14 May 2023, https://explore.berkshiremuseum.org/digital-archive/she-shapes-history/lifting-as-we-climb-the-life-of-mary-church-terrell.
Smith, Jessie Carney, and Shirelle. Phelps. Notable Black American Women. Gale.
Ida B. Wells
*Add piece from my book.
Gallagher, Charles A., and Cameron D. Lippard. Race and Racism in the United States : An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Greenwood, 2014.
Smith, Jessie Carney, and Shirelle. Phelps. Notable Black American Women. Gale.
*Add piece from my book.
Gallagher, Charles A., and Cameron D. Lippard. Race and Racism in the United States : An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Greenwood, 2014.
Smith, Jessie Carney, and Shirelle. Phelps. Notable Black American Women. Gale.