When Anna Julia Cooper was principal of the prestigious M Street High School in Washington, DC in 1892, where she also taught and mentored Black students, the White members of the DC Board of Education decided her intellect and ambition for her Black students was too much for them. So they forced her out.
That thirst for knowledge and determination stayed for her entire life, and was central to what she tried to pass along to her students. the M Street School in the Washington Post recently as, “the first and most prestigious public high school for Black education.” She said, “Black people from around the country aspired to send their children” there, because “its roster of teachers and graduates read like a Who’s Who of Washington’s Black educational and cultural elite.” While Cooper was principal, M Street School students secured scholarships to top colleges and universities, such as Harvard, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth.
But it seemed to really be about keeping women and Blacks “in their place,” and not wanting them to achieve too much. As Moody-Turner wrote in the Washington Post, Cooper was a lightning rod during “a moment of intense political and social backlash against racial advancement and gender equality.”Pennsylvania, Dr. Pamela Nadell, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at American University, and Dr.