A Voice from the South

A Voice from the South. Worthy Ambition. , This Circle Honors Anna Julia Haywood Cooper the educator and civil and women's rights advocate who lived in the gracious house at 201 T Street from 1916 until her death in 1964 at age 105. Born into slavery, Cooper graduated from Oberlin College. She taught at DC's prestigious M Street School, the nation's first high school for African Americans, and became its principal in 1902. Despite pressure to emphasize vocational subjects, Cooper stressed academics. Consequently many of her students won Ivy league college scholarships. She also helped organize the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., received a Ph.D. in French from the Sorbonne at age 65, and presided over Frelinghuysen University, a night school for working adults., At age 55, Cooper became guardian for five grand nieces and nephews, the youngest just six months old. “To house their southern exuberance,” she wrote. she purchased her LeDroit Park home. “The house had been used as a chicken yard by its white tenants and I immediately set about landscaping.”, The double house at 1901-03 Third Street once belonged to General William M. Birney, a white Union military officer who recruited enslaved African Americans during the Civil War (1861-1865). Birney, later a U.S. attorney for DC, published a biography of his father, noted abolitionist James Gillespie Birney., Now restored to its original State, Anna Cooper Circle was split in half for many years for the convenience of cars and buses. Longtime preservationist Theresa Brown spearheaded the restoration effort in 1982. When Brown and LeDroit Park Civic Association Secretary Lauretta Jackson helped gain Historic District status for LeDroit Park in 1974, Howard University was prevented from razing original houses to expand its campus.