This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“The world needs to hear her voice,” was part of Anna Julia Cooper’s lifelong mission for Black girls and women to have educational access and leadership in their own communities and on the national scale.

Probably best known for her declaration in her book A Voice from the South that “when and where I enter…then and there the whole negro race enters with me,”  (thank you Paula Giddings!) Anna Julia Cooper’s creation and navigation of institutions has been profoundly instructive for Brilliance Remastered.

One of the first African American Women to ever get a PhD (at the Sorbonne in Paris), Anna Julia Cooper took what we would call a ‘by every means necessary’ approach to education.  From her work as an advocate for Black girls’ inclusion in educational uplift strategies (which often put her in confrontation with the “race men” of her time) to her long career as a high school educator and principal and the founder of a school for adult learners in her own living room, Anna Julia Cooper’s life story has much to teach us about institutional relationships and possibilities.

The very first institution Anna Julia Cooper had to navigate was slavery.  Born during slavery in North Carolina, Cooper writes about growing up in a community that believed that the dreams of children carried information.  When she was a child, during the Civil War, she remembers adults waking her up in the middle of the night and asking her what she saw.  Was freedom coming? And when?

Cooper confers a similar power on the voices of the people of multiple genders and ages who would be her students and collaborators.  Where and when will we arrive? What do our emerging leaders have to teach us? And how is all of this confined or liberated by the when and where of our educational practices and institutional spaces?  As an educator myself who has used my living room as a central space of engagement and alternative-building, and who has created a life dedicated to learning opportunities for my community within and beyond academics spaces, I want to celebrate Cooper’s emphasis on dreaming and her remarkable talent for transcending boundaries while also working with what she had.

What do you have access to right now that could contribute to a collective miracle? Where (a living room, a public school, beyond national boundaries) is your impact most needed? What if “when” is now?

In gratitude and celebration of Anna Julia Cooper, we offer this meditation.  When I repeat Cooper’s words I think about the possibility of the world hearing it’s own revolutionary  femme voice through our communities.

 And by the way, this is what we work through at Brilliance Remastered all the time (online and in the living room)  if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs