Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born on August 10th, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to an enslaved black woman, Hannah Stanley, and a white man, presumably her mother’s owner. Two years after the Civil War had ended, she attended St. Augustine Normal School and Collegiate Institute, which had been founded by the Episcopal Church to educate African American teachers and clergy. There she became an Episcopalian and married George Cooper, one of her instructors, who was one of the first African American Episcopal priests in North Carolina.

Following the death of her husband, Cooper studied mathematics at Oberlin College, and moved to Washington, D.C. to teach at Washington Colored High School. She was an active member of St. Luke’s Church in Washington, D.C. while Alexander Crummell served as its rector.

Cooper emphasized the importance of equal education for African Americans. An advocate for African American women, Cooper assisted in organizing the Colored Women’s League and the first Colored Settlement House in Washington, D.C.

In 1892, her book A View from the South was published, in which she challengedthe Episcopal Church to offer more direct support for the African American members of its church in their quest for advancement and improvement in a segregated society. She wrote, “... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never.”

On April 3rd, 1925, at the age of 67, Cooper became the fourth African American woman to complete a doctorate, granted by the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1930-1942, she served as President of Freylinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. She died on February 27th, 1964, at the age of 105.