How Did Anna Julia Cooper Challenge The Status Quo?

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During the harsh year of 1858, birthed a genius for political and social agenda for the oppressed colored person, Anna Julia Cooper. Born from a slave, cast out by her slave owner rapist, Cooper’s own mother, illiterate and tarnished desired more for her child. Through this unabashed passion, Cooper rose like no other to a place of inspirational position for her family, her circumstance and her own identity. Growth in a Nation, riddled by injustice and contempt, Julia Cooper divulged a capability to see clearly among the wrong doings of man. Hence forth, she set out to challenge the status quo, beginning with herself. “Cooper’s political action began at age nine in St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, where she protested …show more content…

Plessy v Ferguson, 1892, a cornerstone in racial discrimination, dictated that public places, including railway cars, were considered separate but equal. This ushered in the Jim Crow laws that pushed the separate but equal laws at an alarming pace, causing further oppression for the African Americans. Between 1887 and 1950, nearly 5,000 African Americans were lynched all because of the color of their skin. The war may have been over for the states, but in the hearts of the black person, it had only just …show more content…

In attendance were delegates from around the world, many Caucasians, African Americans, leaders and activists, all to listen to the focal problem impregnating the world at the time. Giving her speech, Cooper calls on those to recognize the problems going on back in the US. “What Cooper has in mind is not the obliteration of one race by another, but the progress that is achievable when we embrace difference and change” (Gines, 2015). Others voiced the situation of African Americans in the work place, those who lack rights equal to the white persons, and the overall oppression as a group. Angered and fed up with how the US continues to ignore the rights of the black woman, allowing the black man to vote, but further oppressing the rights of the woman, she delivers a speech calling on the audience and others to recognize the eroding problem of intersectionality now. The black man had gained some rights, but still the black woman, when was her time? Cooper, took the challenge upon herself and decided to be that voice on behalf of all the suffering black women still lost to the American