Anna J. Cooper

Daily Reading for February 28 • Anna Julia Heyward Cooper, Educator, 1964

Anna Julia Cooper, the widow of an Episcopal priest and a teacher at St. Augustine’s College in North Carolina, was an important supporter of [Alexander] Crummell’s efforts to foster racial uplift. Cooper, who was born in slavery, emphasized the value of education, religion, and proper conduct in assisting the rise of black women and men in the South. One of six delegates from the United States to the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, Cooper was an active public speaker and writer. In an address to a convocation of black priests in 1886, she summoned the clergy to the task of saving their people from “the peculiar faults of worship” into which they fell when left on their own. She praised the Episcopal Church for the positive influence it had offered African Americans before the Civil War, but she was concerned that, following emancipation, white Episcopalians had been pathetically slow in recruiting and ordaining black priests. Although white southerners complained that African Americans were no longer interested in the Episcopal Church, they had created the problem themselves. Since most southern bishops advised black ministerial candidates to aspire only to deacon’s orders, they not only relegated black men to “a perpetual colored diaconate” but also tacitly encouraged them to seek full ordination in other denominations. African Americans in the Episcopal Church needed priests of their own race, Cooper said, for only black men could be fully trusted to “come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes.”

From Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights by Gardiner H. Shattuck (The University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

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