Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, a civil and women's rights pioneer, was one of the earliest black women activists in the realm of higher education. She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, the daughter of a slave, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and her white master, George Washington Haywood.

She showed great academic prom­ise from an early age, receiving a scholarship at age nine to attend St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute; in 1877 she married an instructor at the school, George Cooper. She was widowed in 1879 and never remarried. Cooper entered Oberlin in 1881, where she earned a B.A. in 1884 and an M.A. in mathematics in 1887.

She delivered her paper "The Negro Problem in America" at the Pan-African Conference in Lon­don in 1900 and was subsequently named to the Pan-African Execu­tive Committee. She did graduate work at the Sorbonne, in Paris, during 1911-12 and at Columbia in 1913-16. She received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in 1925. Cooper taught, or served as principal, at Dunbar High School (formerly M Street High), long the only aca­demic high school for blacks in Washington, D.C., for thirty-nine years. She died in 1964, in her life spanning ante-bellum slavery to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.