The Teacher Wars (10 page)

In fact, both Du Bois and Washington expressed ideas that either became common practice or remain at the heart of education debates. In private Sunday evening lectures Washington girded Tuskegee students with
detailed, practical advice about how to open and support new schools for black children: New teachers must seek the trust and support of local ministers and community organizations; they should go door-to-door asking black parents to enroll their children in school; through cookouts and fairs, they should raise money to extend the school year from three months to eight. More than a century later, many contemporary charter schools in black neighborhoods draw students in through door-to-door recruiting, and advocates for “extended learning time” call for (and many charters require) a longer school day, week, and year.
Both men lobbied on behalf of congressional bills that would have provided supplemental federal funding to schools serving poor black children in regions with high illiteracy rates. It took until 1965, when Washington had been dead for nearly half a century and Du Bois for two years, for Congress to finally pass the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which did exactly that.

At the turn of the century, only one predominantly black public school system in the United States
received significant federal funding: the segregated colored schools of Washington, D.C. Because of extra dollars from Congress, there was no pay gap between white and black public school teachers working in the nation's capital, which made Washington a magnet for ambitious black educators.

One of them was Anna Julia Cooper, the daughter of a North Carolina slave and the white man who owned her. For six decades, from her adolescence until her retirement at age seventy-two, Cooper taught in black public schools and colleges. Her long tenure in the classroom tested many of the ideas around which Du Bois and Washington debated. Politically, the two men lobbied for higher teacher pay, yet they often advised individual young black teachers to ignore their low salaries and the day-to-day administrative headaches
of their jobs, and instead to approach their work with what Washington called a “
missionary spirit.” When Du Bois's goddaughter complained that the rural Mississippi public school in which she taught was disorganized, “backward and dumb,” he returned a loving, but stern rebuke, advising her to ignore the school's unprofessional principal and the other, less well-educated teachers. “
Your real duty is, of course, to the children, and they are entirely deserving,” he preached. “You ought to put your whole life and energy in stirring them out of their lethargy and carelessness.”

Anna Cooper could not afford the luxury of such idealism. She was born a slave, widowed at twenty-one, and never remarried. In middle age, she essentially adopted five needy children. So teaching was not only Cooper's calling, but also her permanent livelihood. Consequently, she fought throughout her career for higher pay. And although teacher unionism did not come to Washington, D.C., until 1916, a decade earlier Cooper independently pushed an agenda that was similar to that of the northern, predominantly white teachers organizations founded at the turn of the century. She critiqued early IQ testing and resisted administrative and philanthropic efforts to direct an increasing number of poor children into purely vocational courses.

Cooper's own education had proceeded very much along the lines of Du Bois's hopes for the talented tenth. Born Annie Haywood, she was just six years old at the end of the Civil War and was lucky to live near the Saint Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, which had been founded by the Episcopal Church to provide former slaves with a rigorous classical education. Annie displayed an early aptitude for the written word and was soon on the school's payroll as a tutor to her fellow students. In the evenings she would teach her mother the basics of reading and writing. “
My mother was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known,” Cooper wrote many decades later. “It is one of my happiest childhood memories explaining for her the subtle differences between q's and g's or between b's and l's.”

At Saint Augustine's, Annie took classes in Latin, algebra, and geometry. She met her future husband, the Reverend George Cooper, in Greek class. Both Coopers stayed on to teach at the school
after graduation, but the energetic young minister died in 1879, leaving young Anna Cooper bereaved, but also free to pursue her growing ambitions. In 1881 she applied to Oberlin, a co-ed Christian college in Ohio that had served as a busy stop on the Underground Railroad. Cooper would have been aware of Oberlin's abolitionist reputation, as well as the fact that it was one of the few white liberal arts colleges in the United States that accepted black women. Her thirst for further education—a drive that would later lead her to become one of the first African American women to earn a PhD—shines through in
her application letter to Oberlin president James Fairchild, as does her displeasure at the low wages (about $30 per month) she then earned as a teacher:

Cooper was accepted and granted lodging with the family of a professor. To pay her way through a bachelor's degree and then a master's, she taught French, German, and classics during the summers at Wilberforce University, a black college in Ohio, and at Saint Augustine's, her Raleigh alma mater. She became an active member of the North Carolina Teacher's Association, which advocated more funding for colored schools and equal pay for black teachers. For a time, North Carolina was the only southern state with roughly
equal-per-pupil spending regardless of race, and where the average black teacher's salary was roughly commensurate with the average white teacher's: $204 to $207 annually, about $5,028 in today's dollars. (In the North, public school teachers of either race could earn five times more.) But North Carolina's support for black teachers and schools depended on the political influence of new black voters enfranchised during Reconstruction. In 1900 the state legislature effectively
disenfranchised more than half of these black voters,
through poll taxes, literacy tests, and a “grandfather” clause that required prospective voters to prove a direct ancestor had been registered to vote in 1867. As in other southern states, white resentment toward public spending on black schools was so high that it was only after North Carolina disenfranchised blacks that
the state amended its constitution to provide for the ongoing direct levying of school taxes, in a fashion that would guarantee disproportionate funding for white schools. By the time
Du Bois conducted a survey of southern black public schools in 1908, he found black teachers in North Carolina earning only 60 percent as much as white teachers. Black children made up 32 percent of the school-age population, but received only 17 percent of the state's education funding.

Cooper, like many other better-educated African Americans, chose to leave the former Confederacy as black political capital there declined after Reconstruction. In 1887, through Oberlin connections, she was hired as a Latin teacher at the most prestigious black public school in the United States: M Street High School in Washington, D.C. It was an attractive job for many reasons, not least of which was the relatively high pay, equal to that of almost any white public school teacher anywhere in the country. Charlotte Forten had taught at M Street after returning from the Sea Islands. The school sent graduates on to Ivy League universities each year, and alumni pursued white-collar careers in government, education, the law, and medicine.
In 1899, M Street students scored higher on a district-wide exam than the students at any white public high school in Washington. The school's faculty held more advanced degrees among them than the teachers at any white D.C. public school; some went on to become
university presidents and judges.

M Street served the children of the city's rapidly expanding black middle class in a grand Romanesque-style redbrick building in Washington's Northwest quarter. Cooper excelled there as a Latin teacher and became principal in 1901 while continuing to teach—part of an early wave of women ascending beyond the classroom to leadership roles in schools. When the French priest and educator
Félix Klein visited Cooper's classroom in 1904, he found her leading a group of sixteen girls in a close reading of the
Aeneid
. The
students eagerly translated Latin words and discussed with their teacher the relationship between history and mythology in Virgil's epic poem. Klein had never before seen black children engaged in such feats of intellectualism, and he reported in his subsequent book that Cooper was one of the most skilled teachers he had ever met. He was also impressed with her strict disciplinary strategies. She required M Street's 530 students to walk the hallways in military silence (a common practice at today's “no excuses” charter schools). Each school day began with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer.

Even while teaching full-time, Cooper built a national reputation as a public speaker and essayist. In lectures at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and in front of a convention of black Episcopal clergy, she sketched a vision for “
the colored woman's office,” claiming a special place for black women within the same missionary teacher ideology that Catharine Beecher had applied to an earlier generation of white female teachers. “
The earnest well trained Christian young woman, as a teacher, as a home-maker, as wife, mother, or silent influence even, is as potent a missionary agency among our people as is the theologian,” Cooper said in an 1890 speech, “and I claim that at the present stage of our development in the South she is ever more important and necessary.”

Cooper's 1892 book,
A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South
, was a groundbreaking articulation of black feminist thought. That same year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered a valedictory lecture titled “
The Solitude of Self.” In the speech, seventy-six-year-old Stanton advised every woman to get an education and work outside the home in order to take “personal responsibility of her own individual life.” Cooper, then thirty-four, argued for a more communitarian type of feminism. She expected black women to fight for gender equity not only to enrich their own lives, but also so they could better “uplift the race” as teachers, volunteers, or within their families.
“ 
‘I am my Sister's keeper!'
should be the hearty response of every man and woman of the race,” she wrote, “and this conviction should purify and exalt the narrow, selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.” There could be “
no shirking, no skulking” in the face of the “Race Problem,”
Cooper wrote. Stanton's white feminism looked down upon low-paid teachers. But Cooper's black feminism idealized teachers as leaders in the fight for racial and social equality.

Cooper lived out these ideals. In addition to teaching, she helped establish a settlement house in the mode of Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago. The house, located in Southwest Washington, included a day nursery and kindergarten for young children, as well as a “milk station” that fed sixty babies per day. Volunteers visited poor young mothers at home to instruct them on good parenting methods, and provided adults with a “savings club,” library, music lessons, and arts and crafts classes. Like the contemporary education reformers, such as Harlem Children's Zone visionary Geoffrey Canada, who advocate for “wraparound” social services as an integral complement to effective schools, Cooper saw direct antipoverty work as part of her teaching mission. She used the term “
sympathetic methods” to describe her practice of researching each of her students' home lives in order to better understand and address potential limitations on their academic success, such as unemployed parents, inadequate housing, or sick siblings.

Even so, Cooper's major goal as principal of M Street was strictly achievement oriented: the admission of students into elite colleges. During Cooper's tenure as principal, M Street graduates were accepted to Oberlin, Harvard, Brown, and Yale, and several alumni received Ivy League doctorates.

This display of black intellectualism provoked a moral panic in white Washington and among some black advocates for vocational education who were allied with Booker T. Washington. The coalition Du Bois dubbed the “
Tuskegee machine” challenged M Street early in Cooper's principalship, when she successfully fought off an attempt by the city's white director of high schools to replace the school's classical curriculum with more vocationally oriented classes. In 1901
Washington personally intervened—perhaps with President Teddy Roosevelt himself—to prevent Du Bois from being appointed assistant superintendent in charge of the city's black schools. By 1906 the battle between the Washington and Du Bois camps had become openly hostile. Members of the D.C. school board launched a
campaign of character assassination against Cooper,
whom they likely perceived as aligned with the Du Bois “talented tenth” agenda. They first accused her of managerial incompetence. When those trumped-up charges didn't stick, white school board members claimed—probably erroneously—that she was having an affair with her young adult foster son. The
Washington Post
covered the scandal. Cooper was dismissed.

After nineteen years at M Street, this setback was emotionally and professionally devastating. Cooper was eventually rehired as a teacher at the school, but she never again enjoyed the full support of her supervisors. She went on to earn a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris, at the age of sixty-six. Her groundbreaking dissertation was on attitudes toward slavery during the Haitian and French Revolutions.