Saint Anna Julia Cooper: "...the world needs to hear her voice."

Today, February 28, we honor Anna Julia Haywood Cooper. A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Mrs. Cooper was born August 10, c1859 and died on February 27, 1964. It was while attending St. Augustine Normal School and Collegiate Institute, a school in Raleigh founded by the Episcopal Church to educate African-American teachers and clergy, that she became an Episcopalian. Now a saint of the Episocpal Church, she shares this day with another African American educator, advocate, scholar and humanitarian, Elizabeth Evelyn Wright.

Said Mrs. Cooper, who was also married to the second African-American man ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in North Carolina, “It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.”