Sixth Grade
Worksheets
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper
The years from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement were a time of reform. One woman who spent much of her life fighting for the causes of African Americans and women was Anna Julia Haywood Cooper.
Anna was born into slavery in North Carolina on August 10, 1858, though she had no memory of slavery. She loved learning from an early age. At age nine, Anna went to St. Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute. She worked hard to take courses usually only offered to men. She earned a scholarship to attend Oberlin College.
Anna worked as a pupil-teacher at St. Augustine's Normal School and later as a teacher of Latin, Greek, and math. Then she married George Cooper in 1877. She stopped teaching. As a married woman, she was not allowed to teach. Her husband died two years later. Then she went back to teaching. Anna joined Washington, D.C.'s only black high school, M Street High School. She was principal from 1901 to 1906. She opposed a special vocational education for black youths because she wanted equal education for black students. She insisted on preparing students for college. Many of her students went on to schools such as Harvard. She continually said that African Americans were not intellectually inferior. Many whites had trouble accepting these ideas, and this led to her being fired in 1906. She did return as a teacher to the same school in 1910.
