“Just enough opposition to give zest to the struggle”: Anna Julia Cooper and the Trailblazing Path of a Visionary Educator
A Zoom Conversation with Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State
Program Moderated by Gayle Pinderhughes '70 and Phylicia Fauntleroy Bowman '69
In this talk, we’ll follow the educational journey of Anna Julia Cooper, Oberlin Class of 1884, from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Oberlin College, and on to Washington, DC. We’ll situate her emergence as a visionary Black woman educator, intellectual, and leader in the context of post-Emancipation struggles for equal rights and education. We’ll show how Cooper came to recognize that her activist and intellectual lives were tied together in what would be a continual battle—even in idealist environments like St. Augustine’s, Oberlin, and M Street—for equal rights and racial justice. And finally, we’ll consider what it meant for Cooper to advance her “courageous designs” for Black higher education against a backdrop of increasing antagonism toward Black progress and advancement.
Join us to learn more about Oberlin alum, and longtime DC educational leader, Anna Julia Cooper.
Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner is an associate professor and award-winning teacher of English and African American Studies at Penn State and a former fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research and founding director of both the Black Women’s Organizing Archive and the Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program. Her books include: Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation; Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon; African American Literature in Transition 1900-1910, and most recently the Penguin Portable Anna Julia Cooper. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Business Insider, The 19th, and Perspectives on History. She has worked extensively with the Oberlin College Archives, including materials from the Oberlin Alumni Files in the Portable Anna Julia Cooper and partnering to bring attention to the Oberlin collections through the Center’s international transcription project, Douglass Day 2021, featuring the work of Mary Church Terrell (see President Ambar’s remarks here), and through “papers locators” published on the Black Women’s Organizing Archive website.
She has been researching, writing, and publishing on Anna Julia Cooper’s life and writing for over two decades and is currently completing an interpretive biography of Cooper under contract with Yale University Press. Read Dr. Moody-Turner's March 2024 Washington Post piece on Anna Julia Cooper here.
