Search

Anna Julia Copper’s life can be considered as the epitome of a continuous sense of estrangement that was translated into intellectual and moral agency, into leadership in the field of education as a vehicle for social, economic, political freedom, into intense community work, and into major activism in black women’s rights organizations. She experienced estrangement on several fronts: towards her condition as a black woman, ex-slave, and the subordinate role often reserved for Afro-American women even within the communities to which they belonged; towards her sense of citizenship in a Western country considered the bulwark of democracy, in which segregation and racial violence were a daily reality; against a nationalism from which she felt distant, as a convinced supporter of Pan-Africanism and a global black community.