“We Must Be about Our Father’s Business”:

In 1892, Washington, D.C., educator Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South, her collection of essays considering questions of race, gender, education, and other topics. What Mary Helen Washington has called “the most precise, forceful, well-argued statement of black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century” was written in an Afro-America in a state of desperate flux. The facts of Cooper’s life are crucial to understanding both the historical context in which she wrote as well as how those biographical particulars inform A Voice. Cooper was born Anna Julia Haywood in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, the daughter of Hannah Stanley Haywood, an African-American female slave, and “presumably,” in Cooper’s words, of George Washington Haywood, her mother’s white master. In a key section of A Voice, Cooper describes herself traveling through “a land over which floated the Union Jack”, testing her hypothesis that “there can be no true test of national courtesy without travel”.