First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Also teaching at the high school at the time was one of Cooper’s Oberlin classmates, Mary Church, the daughter of well-off colored real estate developer who had begun life as a slave. Since only unmarried women could teach, the single Miss Church had to leave her post when she married another M Street teacher, Robert H. Terrell, who eventually became principal of the school. Terrell, a lawyer by training, once joked he preferred teaching to the law because “I do so like the consistency of the paycheck.”

  The Terrells became legends of Washington, DC—a true power couple. They both were socially and politically prominent in their efforts to “advance the race.” She became the first black woman appointed to the board of education and was instrumental later in life as a political activist, leading the charge to integrate restaurants in the capital. After leaving his post as principal of M Street, her husband became the first colored municipal judge in Washington, DC.

  But how was it that a high school principal came to the attention of the president of the United States and be appointed a judge? Terrell came with the highest recommendation from Booker T. Washington, a confidant of President Theodore Roosevelt.

  Terrell’s exit from the school was both an opportunity and the beginning of deeper trouble for Mrs. Cooper. By the time she became principal, Anna Julia Cooper had accomplished fifteen years of teaching, scholarship, and charitable activity in local community organizations. She was a respected woman who understood the bigger picture. She knew it was her time to shape the future, not only for the school, but also for a generation of colored men and, perhaps more importantly to her, colored women. About education she would often say, “Not the boys less, but the girls more.”

  With a few exceptions at the turn of the century, education for colored students was basic and minimal. What Anna Julia Cooper wanted to do in DC was radical. Her goal was to build a solid classical curriculum that would be rigorous, challenging, and on par with the courses of study at white schools in the District.

  The timing was right for Cooper’s plan. The year she assumed the principal’s post was the year the business curriculum was officially moved out of the M Street school and into a new colored school, Armstrong. For years it had irked some that former principal Francis Cardozo had introduced a two-year, noncollegiate business curriculum into the academic high school. The local paper often accused him of being more of a politician than an educator because he was once the South Carolina state treasurer. Academic purists were thrilled when Congress gave the nod for a colored trade school.

  Armstrong High School opened in 1902, giving colored teenagers two options for secondary education: academic and technical. At M Street, Cooper was now free to amp up the curriculum to include all the courses a student—white or colored—would need to be considered for the finest colleges in the country: physics, chemistry, Latin, algebra, history, English, Greek, German, Spanish, trigonometry, and something called “political economy.” She also believed in the arts as a way to shape students. She was an accomplished musician herself and encouraged extracurricular activities like dramatics. Cooper believed “dramatic action enables the pupil to vitalize the thoughts and ideas he has studied, to take them into his own life, to make them through imagination a part of his own real self…. Dramatics in the schools will help realize the body as the perfected tool of the soul.”7

  Cooper also had an ample supply of well-trained teachers and better-prepared students. The seeds planted by Myrtilla Miner had sprouted and grown. Miner’s small teachers’ school had been incorporated into the public school system. In its earliest years, graduates of the Miner Normal School, then a colored teachers’ college, were guaranteed a job in the DC school system. By the time Cooper needed highly qualified teachers, Miner had produced a few hundred graduates, mostly women. About 45 percent of them stayed in the District and taught in lower schools.8

  Her faculty included the Miner School valedictorian for the class of 1904, E. B. Henderson, who was also an M Street alum. He was the gym teacher for M Street and spent three summers studying physical education at Harvard. It was there he learned a game called basketball, created by a Canadian athlete. Henderson saw its potential for young colored men and he brought it back to Washington. He established the first-ever colored basketball league. He was also a civil rights activist his whole life and saw to it his students used sports as a means to an end.

  Though physically small, Anna Julia Cooper was commanding. Presiding over a classroom from behind a giant wooden desk, her steady gaze and perfect posture demanded attention, and the whiteness of her high-necked blouse against the darkness of her skin echoed the white chalk rows of perfectly written words on the blackboard behind her. Addressing her students she was clear but firm, compassionate, and often sympathetic to those students whose grammar school educations had left them a bit behind. This style left her open to criticism. She didn’t care, however, because her students ultimately did well on college entrance tests, even if there were struggles along the way. Cooper had a more diverse student body than her predecessors. Her students were the children of laborers, farmers, book binders, porters, nurses, coal dealers, clerks, watchmen, and bricklayers. Some of the children had to work part time or would drop in and out of school. She was committed to helping them. In her first year as principal, Cooper had under her supervision just over five hundred students, by some counts four hundred girls and 130 boys.9

  The second part of Cooper’s plan was to think about the future that lay beyond M Street for those five hundred kids. She spent hours writing letters to admissions officers at all the best colleges and universities, alerting them to the fine Negro candidates she could offer. She, like many race leaders, often used the word “Negro” instead of “colored.” She assured the colleges that her students could pass any entrance exam, but that taking such tests probably wasn’t even necessary. According to legend, some of her students had outscored their white peers on citywide tests. Her scholars were ready.

  While she was principal, M Street graduates William Richard, French Tyson, and Hugh Francis all matriculated at Harvard. Others followed them to Cambridge; still more went north to New Haven to attend Yale, Providence to attend Brown, and Hanover to attend Dartmouth. In four years she placed twenty-two students in Ivy League schools, as well as at Amherst and Rutgers, and many others went on to Howard University and the Miner Normal School.10 It was a remarkable record, given the era.

  Those college admissions officers knew they were not dealing with an ordinary secondary school teacher. By the time she became a high school principal, Cooper was one of the country’s leading feminist intellectuals. She was also considered one of the great community leaders in the District, having helped establish civic organizations such as the Colored Women’s League. She was the only woman ever to be elected to the American Negro Academy, an influential think tank whose members included W. E. B. Du Bois and Arturo Schomburg. Her seminal work, A Voice from the South, a collection of essays about race, gender, and their intersection, was published in 1892, the same year M Street opened its doors. The book’s success clearly established her as a change agent.

  One of Cooper’s well-known essays reveals why she believed so fervently in education. “What Are We Worth?” asks the title question of coloreds and women living in the late nineteenth century. These two segments of society would have to fight for recognition of their worth, but how? Cooper knew in her heart the answer was education. She believed that “education then, is the safest and richest investment possible to man. It pays the largest dividends and gives the grandest possible product to the world—a man.” A man (or woman!), a full being with rights and expectations of liberty. Manhood, womanhood, personhood meant worth. She reasoned education would lead to worth. Education affected home and hearth. Education could even mean the difference between life and death.

  Cooper was keenly aware of the mortality rates among colored Washingtonians, especially those facing the unsanitary conditions of the alleys. Cooper had vo
wed she would “teach the most neglected.”11 She worked with organizations around the District to try to create stability for those in need. Her efforts were part of the unspoken social contract of the times. She was engaging in what was called “racial uplift,” and Cooper exercised it in her private life as well. She raised seven foster children, some of whom attended M Street.

  Invitations arrived from around the world asking the passionate educator to share her message. In 1900 she addressed the Pan African Congress in London along with W. E. B. Du Bois, a kindred spirit. Du Bois, an educator, sociologist, and writer, believed “the Negro race is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” He was convinced that “the black boys need education as well as the white boys.” Of course, Cooper would have added “women” and “girls” to those statements.

  While their philosophies weren’t in lockstep, a profound belief in education as the way toward equality linked Cooper and Du Bois. Their relationship was cordial and professional. As principal, she extended an invitation to speak to the children—one of her first—to Du Bois. In the winter of 1902, Du Bois was pointed in his remarks at M Street. He explained that a movement in the country sought to limit the education of the Negro.12 He was invited back to speak to all the principals of the colored schools. He gave a lecture titled “Heredity and the Public Schools.” His use of heredity referred to the environment in which Negro boys and girls were taught. He warned against those who believed Negroes were inferior but acknowledged that there were conditions that could lead to the appearance of inferiority. He cautioned the District’s teachers to beware of those conditions. One couldn’t say whether his speech was prescient or a catalyst for things to come. But something was brewing in the office of the superintendent of schools that would almost wreck Anna Julia Cooper’s life and endanger the future of M Street.

  In the parallel universe of the District’s white school system, Percy Hughes was the mirror image of Anna Julia Cooper. Mr. Hughes, who favored bow ties and sported a slight comb-over, became a teacher in the same year as Cooper. His social position was such that his marriage made the local paper and he served on presidential inaugural committees. At just about the same time Cooper took over at M Street, he too got a promotion. While running the grandest of the white high schools in the District, Central High, he was tapped for a bigger role, and this is where their similarities ended. Hughes was named the director of schools in June 1902, something that could never have happened to Mrs. Cooper.13 Hughes was seen as the obvious choice: white, male, and the senior principal in service who was known for his “efficient work as the head of the largest school.”14

  Hughes wasted no time making his first reports to his direct superior, the superintendent of schools. Under the new structure, Hughes had jurisdiction over all of the District’s schools; his power now extended not just to the white schools, but to the colored schools as well, due to the Jim Crow-style change in law. Shortly after taking office, Hughes became very interested in some charges of disorderly conduct at the M Street School.

  “A demoralizing state of affairs at M Street high School!” complained a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a ladies’ organization that promoted total alcoholic abstinence as a core value of a civilized society.15 These especially temperate ladies alleged that some uncivilized behavior was going on at the colored high school. The accusation was there had been nothing done about some male students who had allegedly been found drinking and smoking on campus. Corroborating the account was a handsome, conservative colored doctor, Oliver M. Atwood.16 He claimed to have counseled one of the boys in question, an orphan with little parental guidance.17

  While they had no official capacity within the school system, Dr. Atwood and six or seven other gentlemen of color made it their unofficial duty to look after the concerns of their high school. Atwood was nearing the end of a lucrative career in the District and had his eye on a seat on the board of education. An allopath serving Washington’s colored community since 1873, he advertised that he “guaranteed to cure all comers.”18 He was a presence in a certain Washington, DC, colored social circle. His name would appear in the paper time and time again at this party or that event. He would address civic organizations on weighty social issues like “Prohibition in Politics” or how to improve the lives of the colored community in Washington. He believed in personal responsibility. He said, “In laying stress about race pride the community is apt to lose sight of individual development.”19

  The development of colored youth into good citizens was his main concern with respect to the M Street accusations. This charge of drunkenness was troubling and he wanted answers. Dr. Atwood claimed that one of the delinquents confessed to consuming twenty-five-cents worth of whiskey and a beer. The teenager said he was part of a group of boys who drank off campus before coming to school.20 What Dr. Atwood didn’t realize at the time was that as a colored critic of the colored high school principal, he would provide the perfect cover for an attack on Cooper by the white establishment.

  Mrs. Cooper had written to the board in response to the accusation and thought her strongly worded denial of the presence of any inebriated students on campus would be the end of the issue. She didn’t see a need to appear in person to defend herself. She believed the “confessor” was a child who was upset about being expelled for putting talcum powder down a classmate’s shirt.21 The charges represented an annoyance for a woman of Cooper’s intellect. At the time, she believed she had more important things to do. Anna Julia Cooper would often describe her approach to academic design this way: “We are not just educating heads and hands, we are educating the men and women of a race.”

  But rather than quashing the incident, Cooper’s attitude became an invitation for the aggressive new director of schools to look closely at her work. Director Hughes didn’t stick with just the discipline issue, however. He submitted a report to his superiors that recommended minimizing M Street High School’s algebra and English curricula. He maintained that the M Street students were not accomplishing the same work in the same amount of time as white students. He began to say publicly that students at M Street might not be able to handle the same curriculum as students at the white schools and that perhaps the work should be adjusted to a more manageable course of study. Hughes told his professional peers:

  When I first became director I looked into the question of the work of the M Street High School, being pretty well acquainted at that time with the work in the white high schools because I had been principal of the Central School for several years. We gave a test in algebra early in the year and the results of the test in the colored high schools as compared with the results of the same test in the white high schools were such that I felt it wise, after consultation with the head of the department of mathematics, to have the pupils in the colored high school remain longer in the elementary work, i.e. in reviewing the work which had been done in the graded schools. As a result of this, the white high schools finished the subject of factoring about the first of November, but the colored high school was not ready to leave that subject until nearly the middle of December being almost six weeks longer upon it. The same results in character came in other tests, both in English and Latin, and such other tests as were given. The result of this was that after conference with the superintendent of schools, I felt it wise to hold the High School down to the principle of doing thoroughly the work they were doing without any attempt to keep pace with the white schools.

  Cooper may have been the first opponent of “teaching to the test.” She allowed her teachers to take as much time as they needed to make sure the students understood thoroughly. Hughes’s assumption that Cooper’s students couldn’t do the work was what Cooper referred to as the “Where am dat handkerchief Desdemona?” moment.22 It is the moment when ignorance is assumed based on race. In Act III, scene IV, of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor actually asks of his wife, Desdemona, “Lend me thy handkerchief … that which I gave you.” Yet certain listeners h
ear, “Where am dat handkerchief?” because the words come from an African’s mouth. As one of Cooper’s student’s later recalled, “It was pure heresy to think that a colored child could do what a white child could.”23

  Civic leaders were outraged at what they saw as Hughes’s assault on the school. The same had happened in other communities with sad results. Just a few years earlier, in 1899, the US Supreme Court had supported the decision by the Richmond, Georgia, board of education to close down the town’s only colored high school while maintaining white high schools. The locals said there weren’t enough viable colored students to warrant the school.24 Cooper and her allies knew the academic reputation of M Street was critical to its existence. M Street’s good name had to be protected.

  Complaints were lodged. Howard-educated lawyer Shelby Davidson led the charge with a letter of protest to the board of education. The response to Davidson’s communication—rather than to the actual issue he raised—came almost immediately from the white superintendent. It was entered into the board’s minutes.

  M Street’s curriculum is identical to those in other high schools. The Director can raise the standard of scholarship by adapting the teaching to the needs of the individual pupils or classes of pupils. Deficiencies that are apparent in the work of many of the pupils of this school are not in the opinion of the Board due wholly whether to lack of preparation in the graded schools or to unskillful teaching in the high school or to the fact that some pupils attempt high school work who are incompetent to perform it, but to all of these causes combined…. It is far from the purpose of the board to deprive any pupil whose intelligence, industry, and moral worth so entitle him of any opportunity whatsoever for preparing himself for future advancement in learning and usefulness in life. It is however manifestly the duty of those interested in education of the young to insist upon reasonable standards of efficacy on the part of the pupils. Deficiencies in the work of pupil are found in all high schools to a greater or lesser degrees and must be dealt with in each as local condition seem to demand.25