A Voice from the South was published in 1892 by Anna Julia Cooper, an educator who was one of the first two African-American women to be awarded a master’s degree. Since then it has been recognized as one of the first works of Black feminist theory. Setting forth a perspective that would be described as “intersectional” in contemporary terms, Cooper explores her own lived experience as an educated African-American woman, and advocates for the education of African-American women as a necessary means of achieving racial equality. However, her marked emphasis on women’s roles in the household has been critiqued by later theorists as a concession to the 19th century “cult of domesticity”—or, alternatively, a strategic engagement with the dominant cultural view towards women in her time. A Voice from the South continues to be read and analyzed today for its pioneering role in African-American female scholarship. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Recently Anna Julia Cooper has emerged as the most important classic writer in the tradition of African American feminist thought. Mary Helen Washington described Cooper's work as "the most precise, forceful, well-argued statement of black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century." This is the first collection of all of Cooper's major writings, including many never before published. It includes all of the essays from her famous book, A Voice from the South, in addition to many other essays and letters accessible only in archives until now. The organization of this important new collection lends itself to a clearer understanding of the major themes and contributions of Cooper's thought, her development as a thinker and writer, and the critiques and controversies surrounding her work. Lemert and Bhan introduce Cooper as an activist, settlement founder, school teacher, college president, linguist, and scholar—a life that paralleled the prodigious accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois in so many ways.

Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent. May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.

A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history, feminism, and activism, who helped pave the way for modern social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name A Penguin Classic The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual, and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American social and political activism. Recognized as the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history and activism, Cooper (1858-1964) penned one of the most forceful and enduring statements of Black feminist thought to come of out of the nineteenth century. Attention to her work has grown exponentially over the years--her words have been memorialized in the US passport and, in 2009, she was commemorated with a US postal stamp. Cooper's writings on the centrality of Black girls and women to our larger national discourse has proved especially prescient in this moment of Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and the recent protests that have shaken the nation.

Anna Julia Cooper's dissertation, "L'Attitude de la France à l'égard de l'esclavage pendant la revolution," offered a bold interpretation of the French Revolution. In it, she examined the relations between the 18th-century revolutionists in Paris and the representatives and inhabitants of the richest of French colonies, San Domingue. Historian Frances R. Keller now makes this unique work available in English for students and scholars alike. Through Keller's interpretive essays, one is able to better understand the incredible story of Anna Julia Cooper and the importance and originality of her scholarship.

Black Intellectual Thought in Education celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues.

"Ranging from Reconstruction to the Black Power period, this thoroughly and creatively researched book effectively challenges long-held beliefs about the Black Freedom Struggle. It should make it abundantly clear that the violence/nonviolence dichotomy is too simple to capture the thinking of Black Southerners about the forms of effective resistance."—Charles M. Payne, University of Chicago The notion that the civil rights movement in the southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme of civil rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement. In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians. This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. Akinyele Omowale Umoja is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and other social movements.