Gender and Race: Exploring Anna Julia Cooper’s Thoughts for Socially Just Educational Opportunities

Abstract

Many scholars, activists, and concerned educators have acknowledged that a socially just and equitable educational experience is the key to transforming lives and changing worlds. As noted by social justice scholars Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, "In an increasingly abrasive and polarized American society . . . social justice can play a constructive role in helping people develop a more sophisticated understanding of diversity and social group interaction, more critically evaluate oppressive social patterns and institutions, and work more democratically with diverse others to create just and inclusive practices and social structures," particularly in the area of education.' Teaching for social justice is teaching that not only examines the legacy of the interlocking structures of oppression, but teaching that recognizes the fundamental requisites of human liberty, and in turn it engages students in a pursuit to resist the barriers to their full humanity. Historical examinations of the pedagogical practices or the philosophical perspectives of social justice education are seldom studied. And the social justice ideas, writings, and intellectual discourses by past and present African-American educators who have utilized a social justice philosophical or pedagogical stance have been ignored or not taken up seriously in the dominant educational literature on social justice education. Anna Julia Cooper (1859.^-1964)^, one of the most influential educators, activists, and scholars of the late nineteenth and earlyto-mid twentieth centuries, developed sophisticated theoretical critiques of the race, gender, and class, ideologies underlying the U.S. and European oppression of blacks in this nation and in the black diaspora. Her writings and speeches reflected a social justice analysis in education and other sociological issues and cultural critiques that impacted the lives of African Americans. As an author and feminist. Cooper wrote A Voice from the South in 1892. This book, considered a black feminist treatise, consists of a collection of essays that reflects a black feminist analysis on racism and sexism. It focuses on the race problem in nineteenth-