The superintendent adroitly showed his support for Hughes without directly attacking M Street. What the school’s founders had feared was coming true: the colored citizens were losing control of their schools.
Cooper was not deterred. On occasion the principal simply defied the director. She, too, believed that she could “raise the standard of scholarship by adapting the teaching to the needs of the individual pupils or classes of pupil.” For example, when her students were given new, less complex sets of textbooks, she simply returned to using the original volumes without consulting anyone.
At other times, Cooper tried to engage Hughes. In June 1903, Cooper called on the director to discuss two of her most earnest students. They were scheduled to graduate that month, but there seemed to be an issue with the completion of one or two courses.
“Director Hughes, two of my pupils have conditions from back in the second year, one in algebra and one in geometry. You may remember Miss Banion?” she asked, likely knowing the white director had no knowledge of the colored teenager.
The director’s response was short and direct. “Well, have the girl review the material and take an examination upon it to complete her coursework.” Mrs. Cooper was to report back with the results. She did so, at his home, on a Sunday just before graduation.
“Director, my Miss Banion has taken the examination and is not quite up to the passing point, but she has done her best. She is a hardworking student.”
“What mark has been made?
“Sixty-five percent. We must realize the girl had not been studying the subject for the past two years and when she had it, she was under some disadvantages. She is just ten points off of passing clearly. Given her earnest desire to learn, I would recommend graduation, Mr. Hughes.”
“Do you believe the girl had done the best she could?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“If these are the circumstances, then you have my approval.”
Hughes would later claim that the Miss Banion had only made 45 percent on her examination and that Cooper had given him “wrong information.”26 Hughes told people Principal Cooper was in denial. He said that perhaps her knowledge of the conditions at M Street as compared with those in the white high schools was not sufficient to enable her to make the comparison very clearly. The thinly disguised implication was that Anna Julia Cooper was in some way incompetent or inferior to her counterparts.
The following year, around the time of graduation, Director Hughes went on the offensive. He contacted the M Street principal. “Mrs. Cooper, I’ve been made aware of four students who teachers said were unprepared to go one to the next grade. Mrs. Cooper, you are to send those students back after a conference with their parents.” It was a clear, non-negotiable position: hold the students back one year.
Hughes later told a congressional committee that Cooper agreed but then appealed to one of the two colored members of the board of education to help her secure diplomas for the students. They in turn appealed to the colored assistant superintendent, who considered the students’ records and character. The colored assistant superintendent agreed to graduate the students, but the white superintendent countered that the assistant was not authorized to do so. The colored chain of command did not matter. A few months later, formal charges were brought against Anna Julia Cooper, accusing her of impudence and “inefficiency and ability to maintain good conduct and decorum.”27
“There is a concerted movement to persecute Mrs. Cooper,” claimed Reverend Francis Grimké, a Princeton Theological Seminary graduate who preached at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, where the high school had humbly begun. He voiced much of what colored Washington believed. “There is a plot for the undoing of Mrs. Cooper.” It was man versus woman. White versus colored. Belief in racial inferiority versus race pride. Who would win?
In the segregated capital of the country, the answer was the person with the most power or access to it.
As the principal of the country’s premier academic high school for Negroes, a word Cooper and other intellectuals often used, she was more philosophically aligned with W. E. B. Du Bois than Booker T. Washington. Her career was in jeopardy because of a wider philosophical and political argument about what was better for Negroes—the Du Bois model of intellectual advancement or the vocational/industrial method promoted by the other great race leader of the time, Booker T. Washington.
The two men desired the same thing: a better existence for their people. One thought the road to equity would be achieved by using the mind; the other believed it would come through the work of the hands. Their positions reflected their backgrounds. Du Bois was born a free man; Washington was born a slave. Washington was greatly admired for developing and transforming the Tuskegee Institute into an excellent school that promoted self-reliance through practical skills. Washington believed economic advancement would come through self-determination and that challenges to racial segregation and disenfranchisement weren’t the immediate priority. That view put him at odds with other Negro intellectuals.
On September 18, 1895, Washington took to the podium at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition and delivered the speech that would define him, which became known as the Atlanta Compromise.
Of those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded….
Cast it down in agriculture, in mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world….
Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities….
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South….
While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual p
rogress.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.
His message was not what many Negroes wanted to hear, and exactly what many whites did. Men like the superintendent and director of high schools in Washington, DC, thought vocational training should be integrated back into the M Street curriculum and that the school’s current all-academic program was not serving all Negro students.
Booker T. Washington was called both respectfully and pejoratively the “Great Accommodator” and the “Good Negro.” A skilled politician, he attracted and cultivated relationships with white political and business leaders like Andrew Carnegie. He became a power broker, making and breaking careers, as he had with Judge Terrell in Washington. He was a colored man who summered next to President Roosevelt and was the first colored person invited to eat in the White House with him, in 1901.
The acceptance that met Washington’s message and his power deeply disturbed those pushing for integration and equality. Du Bois considered Washington “shrewd and tactful” and did admire his sincerity. However, Du Bois, along with other DC intellectuals like Kelly Miller and Archibald Grimké, believed Booker T. Washington’s method would lead to “industrial slavery and civic death.” Du Bois, in his book The Souls of Black Folk, wrote in chapter three (called “On Booker T. Washington and Others”):
There is among the educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained.
Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up at least for the present three things—
First, political power.
Second, insistence on civil rights.
Third, higher education of Negro youth.
The triple paradox:
He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans businessmen and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible under modern competitive methods for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.
He insists on thrift and self respect but at the same time counsels a silent submission to visit inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.
Even though Washington appeared as a commencement speaker at M Street in 1904, Anna Cooper was in danger of being run over by the Tuskegee Machine, as his political clique was known. But her beliefs were truly a hybrid of the Tuskegee sensibility and the more intellectually focused aspirations of Du Bois. She celebrated the dignity of hard, manual work in her essay “The Ethics of the Negro Question.”
The American Negro is capable of contributing not only of his brawn and sinew but also from brain and character a much-needed element in American civilization; and here is his home…. His blood has mingled with the bluest and the truest on every battlefield that checkers his country’s history. His sweat and his toil have, more than any other’s, felled its forests, drained its swamps, plowed its fields, and opened up its roads and waterways.
In the same essay she explained the pitfalls of labor with suffrage.
The Negro under free labor and cutthroat competition today has to vindicate his fitness to survive against a color-phobia that heeds neither reason nor religion and a prejudice that shows no quarter and admits no mitigating circumstance…. The condition of the male laborer … is even more hopeless. Receiving 50 cents a day for unskilled but laborious toil, from which wage he boards himself and is expected to keep a family in something better than a “one room cabin” the Negro workman receives neither sympathy nor recognitions from his white fellow laborers.
The answer was clear: education first.
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892.
Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
In September 1905, the work, conduct, philosophy, and personal integrity of Anna Julia Cooper would be judged by the District of Columbia Board of Education: seven white citizens and two colored, one of the latter in professional debt to Booker T. Washington.28
Friday, September 22, 1905. The school board officially announced it would consider the charges against Anna Julia Cooper. Director Hughes’s statement, in which he contended that the students of M Street were “incapable of taking the same studies” as the students in the city, was presented.29
Tuesday, September 26, 1905. A local white businessman and Atwood sympathizer, T. S. Leisenring, was allowed to testify and claimed that Cooper’s record as a teacher in North Carolina was not as glorious as reported. He called on the board to inquire with a local congressman to confirm his allegations.
Thursday, September 28, 1905. North Carolina Representative George White, who was black, testified. He was expected to malign Mrs. Cooper but instead offered robust support, which was entered into the minutes.
Mrs. Cooper was a splendid woman and she was greatly respected in the State from which she came. She taught in the Raleigh institution after she married Mr. Cooper and continued to do so after his death and until she went to Oberlin College. She then came here when she was first assistant principal of the M Street School and then principal. The colored people of Washington thoroughly resent the persecution of her in this matter and if the board should decide against her they are willing to appeal to a higher tribunal.
Friday morning, September 29, 1905. A headline in the Washington Post read, COLORED PEOPLE AROUSED OVER HIGH SCHOOL INQUIRY. Apparently Congressman White had been made to wait two hours while the board conducted other business until 10:00 PM. The delay tactics left time for only two witnesses, including White, to speak for a total of thirty minutes. Others who had come out to voice their support were not allowed to address the board.
Friday evening, September 29, 1905. Cooper’s accusers, T. S. Leisenring and Dr. O. M. Atwood, were asked to return to the Franklin Building to meet with the board. Mr. Leisenring was discredited by Congressman White’s pro-Cooper statement.
Wednesday, October 4, 1905. The board took five days to respond to the congressman’s assertion that Cooper was being persecuted. In the only official public statement to the press, board member Charles Needham spoke on the record to the Washington Post:
I’ve always stood for the use of the same text books in the colored schools as in the white schools. The question however concerns the curriculum and in that too I believe there should be an equality of studies all the way through. I do not think the charges of drunkenness against the pupil and the non-reporting by the principal have been sustained. I think the matter should not have been allowed to run along so long.
At the time Needham’s word meant something. Years later, he had to resign as president of George Washington University after depleting GWU’s endowment from $200,000 to $16,000 by signing a promissory note that listed his house as security. The home was worth $8,000 at the time.30
Thursday, October 5, 1905. Only one witness appeared before the board. Director Percy M. Hughes was called to testify. He never wavered from his position. The charges remained the same: colored pupils could not complete the same courses in the same time as white students. He said four English teachers at M Street had told him that their students were incompetent in English. Cooper pushed certain students ahead for collegiate honors, competing with whites for scholarships. Cooper refused to hold students back, and when directly ordered to do so, she “disobeyed” him. There was no mention of drunkenness in the record.
Tuesday
, October 17, 1905. Anna Julia Cooper had been prepared to present her case on October 16, 1905; however, three committees arrived that day demanding the opportunity to defend her. One group represented the parents; another represented the civic-minded colored women of the District. Mr. Jesse Lawson, a Howard-educated lawyer, said he had “evidence” to prove Cooper’s administration was satisfactory to the majority. It was a bold move for Lawson. He too had benefited from the help of Booker T. Washington, but in 1870 his wife, Rosetta, had been one of the first four pupils to attend the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in the basement of the Fifteenth Street church. This was personal. Cooper would have to wait one more day.
Wednesday, October 18, 1905. Finally, almost two years after the accusations had first been made, Anna Julia Cooper had her say. Cooper presented her enhanced scholarships, the increased reputation of the school, and the impressive placement of graduates as evidence of her dedication and success as an educator. She took the opportunity to testify that her school should not be discriminated against by being forced to teach a lower curriculum, nor should any other colored schools. She told the board she was defending a bigger issue, that of race efficacy.
Cooper and her Washington allies were fighting for something more serious than just what textbook to use. They knew they were in a rare position to change things for others. Ninety percent of colored people still lived in the South under harsh Jim Crow laws. Ninety-five percent of all colored people couldn’t read or could barely read. Even within the confines of Washington, those colored citizens who were poor and uneducated lived in desperate conditions. The students of M Street, at this point mostly working- and middle-class sons and daughters of domestic workers and clerks, could help themselves and one day would help their race heal from the scars of slavery and move on to prosperity.
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