Suzanne Scott Constantine
Mixed media on canvas, 2024. 40” x 30”

I discovered Anna Julia Cooper in 2018. Incredulous that it had taken me so long to learn about this extraordinary African American woman, I set on a path to understand her life and why it had been obscured from me. After all, I had studied about racial justice – and injustices – my entire life.

Anna Julia Cooper was an intellectual, an educator, an activist, and a writer, born in Raleigh in 1858 to an enslaved mother and educated at the St. Augustine Colored School and at Oberlin College. In 1902 she became principal at a colored high school in Washington DC (now Dunbar High), completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne at the age of 67, and eventually moved back to Raleigh where she died in 1964. Historians and feminist researchers have made her exemplary life and career better known, and she even has a US stamp honoring her work. Still, few people know anything of her life, and my own family lived in her orbit without ever knowing she existed.

During Anna Julia Cooper’s long life in Raleigh and in Washington, DC, my own family’s lives moved through the same landscapes but on opposite tracks, sometimes parallel, but never intersecting. The strictures of Southern gentility, taught to me during my North Carolina upbringing, kept my family completely separate from Anna Julia Cooper’s during a time when separate and unequal was the rule. I believe my genteel southern mother would have loved Anna Julia Cooper, but the arbitrary boundaries that were constructed to sustain hierarchies made it impossible for her to even know about this intellectual Black woman because she did not work as a domestic. Intellectually, their interests would have been the same. And their manners impeccable! I know it.

Through this work, I disavow that legacy of false hierarchies and declare that the spirit of the true gentlewoman of Raleigh, Anna Julia Cooper, resides in the New Angel of History.