Born into slavery, Anna Julia Cooper attended school and excelled as a student in St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Anna attended Oberlin College, one of the few colleges open to Black American students and women, graduating in 1887. 

Cooper focused her work on building Black American institutions, believing that the freed slave population should learn the liberal arts to counteract the white-supremacist beliefs of Black intellectual inferiority.  Others, such as Booker T. Washington, contended that Black Americans should focus on vocational skills and trades to earn the respect of white Americans. But Cooper promoted subjects like Latin, Greek, French, and philosophy as subjects for Black American students. She believed that the educational and moral uplift of Black American women in particular were central to the Black American community and overall well-being of U.S. society.  

Cooper expected that Christians should apply their faith to pressing issues of the day, like racism. Christianity and Christian education, in particular, encouraged “both mental progress and the ethical edifice for virtuous living.  She asked the nation to live up to the religion many professed and to apply the teachings of Jesus to racial conflict.” 

What would Jesus teach in the United States today about who is my neighbor? she wondered.

Cooper loved the idea of a lived faith, living the example of Jesus who “modeled the infinite possibility of humankind’s moral, social, and intellectual capacities. Her conception of Christianity was not a set of theological propositions meant for discussion.” Cooper wrote, “Religion must be life made true. . . and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never.” 

She saw many white Americans twist Christ’s teachings to justify racism, promoting segregation and unequal educational prospects.  Her words of warning were “Anglo Saxon America is in danger of forgetting how to deal justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with its God.” 

Nonetheless, Cooper remained hopeful: “better to light a candle than curse the darkness. It has been my aim and hope to light candles that may carry on lighting others in God’s own way of goodwill and helpful living.” 

Myrlie Evers-Williams, civil rights activist and Chairperson of NAACP from 1995-1998, is also known as the widow of Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist. At the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi in December of 2017, Evers-Williams said this:

I see something today that I had hoped I would never see again. That is prejudice, hatred, negativism that comes from the highest points across America. . . and I found myself asking Medgar in the conversations that I have with him: Is this really what’s happening again in this country? And asking for guidance because—I don’t mind admitting this to the press—I’m a little weary at this point.

But it’s something about the spirit of justice that raises up like a war horse. That horse that stands with its back sunk in and hears that bell—I like to say the ‘bell of freedom.’ And all of a sudden, it becomes straight, and the back becomes stiff.  And you become determined all over again.” 

It is wearying work. But it is the work Christ calls us to do.

Jemar Tisby, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2024), 3-4; 122-125.