Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL)

Our nation is changing by the day, and these changes are altering the community college landscape. The time is ripe, then, to reflect on what community colleges have been. It is only then that we can prudently reshape them into what they need to be.

The Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) conveyed this message at the 2025 Council for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC) Conference. As a CSCC Double Diamond Sponsor, we had the honor of naming a conference room after a leader who epitomized and contributed to the mission of community colleges. As an organization, we decided there was no better option than to honor Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), the visionary professor, principal and college president who devoted her 165-year career to the causes of learning, education and civil rights. Cooper expanded educational opportunities and trailblazed pathways in education. This goal is a part of OCCRL’s mission.

Education

Education, to Cooper, was the “noblest calling.” Hers began at Saint Augustine’s Normal School in Raleigh, a school founded after the Civil War for African American freedmen. Cooper was born into slavery to Hannah Haywood and is believed to be the granddaughter of John Haywood, a founder of the University of North Carolina. She attended St. Augustine’s on scholarship and quickly gained a reputation for academic excellence. Cooper distinguished herself in literature, languages, mathematics and the sciences and began tutoring both young and old individuals, which helped defray the costs of her education. 

Although precocious, Cooper had to battle with administrators at St. Augustine’s to take the more rigorous courses set aside for boys, signaling her future as a champion for educational pathways. She protested to gain access to male-only classical education in the early 1870s, successfully winning this right not just for herself but for all female students at St. Augustine’s .

Cooper carried her reputation for access and excellence to Oberlin College which, when she enrolled, offered a two-year certificate track for women and a four-year A.B. track for “gentlemen.” Cooper insisted on taking Oberlin’s “gentleman’s study,” graduating from the program with high honors in 1884. At the almost unheard of age of 25, Cooper left Oberlin to become an African American college professor, although women only made up 1.9% of college students in the U.S., with African American women making up a mere fraction of that 1% . From Oberlin, Cooper set off into the world “interested in the education of … neglected people,” paving education pathways for those to come .

Professor and Teacher

Cooper quickly accomplished her mission of spreading educational opportunities nationwide. She served as professor of literature and languages at Ohio’s historic Wilberforce University before returning to teach geometry, Latin and Greek at her alma mater, St. Augustine’s. 

Cooper took graduate courses during this time, and by 1888, earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Oberlin. This historic achievement solidified her reputation as a national leader in African American education. The notoriety it garnered soon attracted a highly sought after position as a tenured teacher at the elite Washington Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in Washington D.C. Among her colleagues at Washington Preparatory, Cooper could count scholars like Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the predecessor of Black History Month.

Her teaching excellence opened doors up for many, permitting dozens of her African American students to enter highly selective HBCUs and Ivy League colleges upon graduation. By 1902, she became principal of Washington Preparatory, the nation’s most prestigious African American high school.

Adult Education and Community College President

Although Cooper earned a reputation for excellence in African American secondary education, scholars argue that it was with her adult learners at Frelinghuysen University that she “had the greatest impact … in her role as an educator” . Retiring from Washington Preparatory in 1930, Cooper was elected president of Frelinghuysen University at age 70. It was here that Cooper made some of her most notable and lasting contributions to adult education and community colleges. Frelinghuysen was set up to address a pathway gap since African Americans were not permitted to attend the many college extension programs available in the D.C. area.

One of Cooper’s most profound contributions was identifying this population and the programming gap it suffered. Cooper was among the earliest to argue that there should be an in-between program for adults who, for academic reasons, could not gain entrance into colleges and universities yet were too old to attend secondary schools. Cooper observed, “there is absolutely no door open to the struggling colored man or woman, aspiring for the privileges of advanced education” . Calling for such a program at the height of the Great Depression, Cooper’s idea was a “pioneering educational reform” that would be endorsed by the Truman Commission Report in 1947 and replicated at scale after the 1960s .

Frelinghuysen University was unlike any institution that came before or after it. It was a tuition-supported, non-degree-granting university that targeted low-income African Americans with vocational and academic programs. The curriculum included business, liberal arts, nursing and sciences. Classes were held in the evenings and students met in neighborhood homes and businesses to cut down on costs and commuting time. Cooper devoted an entire section of her home to Frelinghuysen. She also furthered its mission by founding the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School, a Frelinghuysen unit for developmental education, which catered to students with special and remedial needs. One of the school’s graduates would go on to write a master’s thesis in history under the direction of Carter G. Woodson.

Building pathways like these for underserved students was Frelinghuysen’s mission. Cooper declared the school’s aim was “to enable men and women who cannot make their leisure time fit into the schedule of a ... college or university to pursue ... higher and broader education” .

Anna Julia Cooper's Mark on Community Colleges, OCCRL and Beyond

In honoring Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, OCCRL not only pays tribute to a visionary force in education, but one who epitomized and contributed to the mission of community colleges as engines of access, opportunity and higher learning.

Cooper made profound contributions to vital areas of adult education, community colleges and higher education. She was a groundbreaking scholar who contributed to curriculum reforms still felt in education, helping open up the liberal arts curriculum to African Americans, working-class students and women of all races and championing it against the prevailing view that adult education should emphasize skill-building and vocational learning. Her collection—A Voice from the South (1892)—is included in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is taught every semester at colleges and universities.

Frelinghuysen University contributed to the wide spread of community colleges. It was also a direct predecessor to later African American school reforms like Freedom Schools, community-controlled schools and today’s Independent Black Schools. Contemporary scholars and educators consider the pathways and excellence Cooper and her colleagues established at Washington Preparatory to be the gold standard for African American education to this day.

As we reflect on the mission of community colleges, we recall and honor Cooper’s legacy as a call to action and a model for thinking outside of the box.

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