A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South

Glossary

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"A Voodoo Prophecy": An 1892 poem by Maurice Thompson, published in the New York Independent, which ventriloquizes a Black prophet vowing savage vengeance and the racial corruption of white America. Cooper quotes it at length and then turns it inside out: the poem fails as poetry because it is untrue of the Black man, who "is in real life only too glad to accept the olive branch of reconciliation" — but it succeeds as "a revelation of the white man," laying bare the secret dread of Black domination and racial absorption that she diagnoses as the monomania behind Southern policy.; Related: The Two Classes of Authors
"Let the Lion Turn Painter": Cooper's conclusion to her literature survey, built on the old proverb "The devil is always painted black — by white painters": an authentic portrait of the Black American "as a free American citizen... divinely struggling and aspiring yet tragically warped and distorted by the adverse winds of circumstance" has not yet been painted, and "the canvas awaits the brush of the colored man himself." She notes that the race had produced America's only native folklore and folk song, yet its one popular chronicler, Joel Chandler Harris, was "not to the manner born" — and hopes to see before she dies "a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro's standpoint."; Related: The Two Classes of Authors, "A Voodoo Prophecy"
"Shall Woman Learn the Alphabet": An 1801 book by the Frenchman Sylvain Maréchal proposing a law to prohibit women from learning to read, which Cooper opens her education essay with as a specimen of received wisdom at the start of her own century. Maréchal argued, with citations, that literacy destroyed womanliness and that history's admirable women could not spell their names. Cooper uses the book as a baseline against which to measure the century's revolution: by her writing, over four hundred American colleges granted the B.A. to women.; Related: The Oberlin "Ladies' Course", The Feminine Side of Truth
"The Gain from a Belief": The book's closing essay, staged as an encounter with a skeptic in the marketplace — the embodiment of the era's fashionable agnosticism descending from Hume through Comte to the American lecturer Robert Ingersoll. Against the creed that "the world rests on nothing," Cooper defines faith as "treating the truth as true" and argues that a race "at almost the embryonic stage of character-building" needs heroism, devotion, and sacrifice — none of which a primarily skeptical spirit can supply. Her clinching image is the enslaved man following the North Star: he believed it pointed to a country "where a man's a man." "Is he the poorer for his ignorant hope? Are you the richer for your enlightened suspicion?"; Related: The Equilibrium Theory of Progress
"What Are We Worth?": Cooper's deliberately unsentimental economic audit of the race, opening from Henry Ward Beecher's remark that if Africa and the Africans sank tomorrow the world would lose only "a little less gold and ivory." Adopting the world's own commercial standard — raw material, labor invested, product demanded — she tallies the race's assets a generation after emancipation: over 25,000 schools, 22,956 Black teachers, $264 million in taxable property held despite the collapse of the Freedman's Savings Bank, and uncounted patents and crops that census-takers never credited by color. Her ledger's moral: the race will finally be judged by "what sort of men and women" it produces.; Related: Industrial Training versus the Classics, The Louisiana Native Guards at Port Hudson
"When and Where I Enter": The book's most famous sentence: "Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'" Cooper's claim is that the race's progress cannot be measured by its eminent men — "no man can represent the race" — but only by the condition of its ordinary homes and the women who make them, so the elevation of Black women is not a side issue but the fundamental test and engine of the whole race's advance.; Related: Our Raison d'Être, The Colored Girls of the South
"Who Are Americans?": Cooper's retort to the nativist cry "America for Americans!" and to schemes for deporting or colonizing Black citizens. If priority of settlement decides the question, the red men hold title "by law of primogeniture," and the first delegation from Africa landed in 1619 — a year before the Mayflower. She reserves special scorn for "a self-constituted tribunal of 'recent arrivals'" calculating the cost per head of shipping ten million citizens whose ancestors built the country to Africa — "at least till some one has consulted those heads."; Related: The Equilibrium Theory of Progress
"Woman versus the Indian": The title of a paper by the Rev. Anna Shaw at the 1891 National Woman's Council, which Cooper borrows for her chapter in order to criticize its framing. By casting the educated white woman as "plaintiff in a suit" against the Indian and the Negro — indignant that the ballot went to "lower" groups first — the movement's leaders, Cooper argues, disparaged the very principle that justified their own cause. Her correction: woman's plea should rest "not on Indian inferiority, nor on Negro depravity," but on the obligation of legislators to do as they would be done by.; Related: Woman's Cause Is the Cause of the Weak, Wimodaughsis

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A Woman Question and a Race Problem: Cooper's formulation of the Black woman's "unique position in this country": "She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both." White women enter public work with their men's support, while the colored woman finds even the men of her own race, "as a rule... dropped back into sixteenth century logic" on the woman question. Yet Cooper converts the double burden into a double vantage: "to be a woman of the Negro race in America... is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages."; Related: Our Raison d'Être, "When and Where I Enter", The Roll of Pioneer Black Women

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Dr. Crummell's "The Black Woman of the South": A pamphlet by Alexander Crummell, the pioneering Episcopal priest and scholar Cooper calls "Moses and the Prophets" on the subject of Southern Black women's needs, which proposed church sisterhoods and industrial schools for their support. Cooper reports that the pamphlet "fell still-born from the press" — the church took no action on its recommendations — and positions her own essay as a renewed plea in its spirit, adding her distinctive focus on the colored girls of the South.; Related: The Colored Girls of the South, The Episcopal Church's Black Clergy Question

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Industrial Training versus the Classics: Cooper's intervention in the era's central educational debate, made years before it crystallized around Washington and Du Bois. She explains why the freed race rushed first to Latin and Greek — Calhoun had sneered that a Negro who could master the Greek subjunctive might "vindicate his title to manhood," and labor was tainted by its association with slavery — but argues the race "began at the wrong end": wealth must pave the way for learning, and trades must be taught in Black schools because white union monopolies had closed every other door. Yet she equally defends the exceptional mind's right to "go the full length of its desires," refusing to force either the whittler into Greek or the scholar into the shop.; Related: "What Are We Worth?"

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Our Raison d'Être: Cooper's opening statement of purpose, framed as a courtroom scene: America's race question has been argued by attorneys on every side, but "one important witness has not yet been heard from" — the Black woman. Writing from Tawawa Chimney Corner in September 1892, Cooper offers her book as testimony from "the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America," arguing that no verdict on the nation's problem can be fair until truth is presented from each standpoint, including hers.; Related: "When and Where I Enter", A Woman Question and a Race Problem

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Soprano Obligato: The musical title of the book's first part, covering the four essays on womanhood, education, and the woman's movement. An obbligato is an indispensable solo line that must not be omitted from a performance: Cooper casts the Black woman's voice as exactly such a line in the national composition — a soprano part the rest of the music is incomplete without. The section opens with an epigraph from George Eliot on "royal-hearted women" whose grace extends to "needy, suffering lives in lowliest place."; Related: Tutti ad Libitum, Our Raison d'Être

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The "Perpetual Colored Diaconate": A proposal circulating in the Episcopal Church to keep Black clergy permanently at the subordinate rank of deacon, "carefully and kindly superintended by the white clergy," rather than admitting them to full priesthood and self-direction. Cooper treats the idea as the ecclesiastical version of the South's whole theory of race relations — contented "well tended sheep" catechized at intervals and taught contentment in their station — and answers that no such "thus far and no farther" pattern can be fitted to growth in God's kingdom.; Related: The Episcopal Church's Black Clergy Question
The "Social Equality" Humbug: Cooper's dissection of the era's standard objection that civility toward Black people would impose "social equality" — one of two "humbugbears," alongside "these people were once our slaves," used to excuse discourtesy. She shows the argument rests on an ambiguous middle term: buying lunch at the same restaurant or riding in a common car no more forces intimate association than "paying for dry goods at the same counter." Genuine social selection, she notes, can never be legislated — and she adds pointedly that the forced associations in the two races' actual past "were not made by the manacled black man, nor by the silent and suffering black woman."; Related: The Separate Car Law, Wimodaughsis
The Board of Lady Managers: The women's governing body of the 1893 Columbian Exposition at Chicago, which Cooper identifies as "the first women legally appointed by any government to act in a national capacity" and reads as marking "the dawn of a new day" in woman's public status. The reference dates the essay to the Exposition's planning period and anchors Cooper's periodization of American history — discovery, settlement, accumulation — at the threshold of a new era in which "woman's sentiments must strike the key-note."; Related: A Woman Question and a Race Problem
The Census of College-Bred Black Women: Cooper's own survey, conducted by writing to colleges that admitted women, of how many Black women had ever completed the B.A. course at each: Fisk led with twelve, Oberlin had five, Wilberforce four, Ann Arbor and Wellesley three each, Livingstone two, Atlanta one, Howard none. A footnote records the first Black woman graduate of Cornell in 1890. Cooper presents the meager totals as evidence not of incapacity but of an atmosphere that offered Black women "no special stimulus" — and closes with the appeal "not the boys less, but the girls more."; Related: The Greek Class for Ministerial Candidates, The Oberlin "Ladies' Course"
The Colored Girls of the South: The group Cooper singles out as her special plea: the "large, bright, promising fatally beautiful class" of young Black women growing up with neither paternal protection nor legal shelter, "waylaid by the lower classes of white men" and dismissed by a caste spirit that "cynically assumes 'A Negro woman cannot be a lady.'" Citing England's White Cross League as a model of organized protection for vulnerable women, she demands that Black men and the church answer "I am my Sister's keeper!" and treat these girls as "the hope in germ" of the race's future womanhood.; Related: "When and Where I Enter", Dr. Crummell's "The Black Woman of the South"
The Corcoran Art Gallery Refusal: An episode Cooper reports from the American capital: a Black woman artist submitted drawings to the Corcoran school, had them judged excellent by the best critics, and received a ticket of admission with high compliments — which the superintendent cancelled the next day when she appeared in person and he saw her color. Cooper uses the incident to ask whether "even art in America is to be tainted by this shrivelling caste spirit," arguing that no national art or literature can "speak a language intelligible in all climes" while prejudice against externals shuts whole classes of human subjects out of its sympathy.; Related: The "Social Equality" Humbug
The Episcopal Church's Black Clergy Question: Cooper's indictment of her own denomination's failure among Black Southerners: by the published report of 1891 the Protestant Episcopal Church had only about twenty-six Black priests nationwide and barely one self-supporting Black congregation in the South, while the African Methodist Episcopal Church — built on Black self-direction — counted over fourteen thousand ministers and four thousand self-supporting churches. Cooper locates the cause not in Black "racial proclivities," as one Southern bishop claimed, but in the church's refusal to respect Black personality: she recounts a Black priest warned by his own ordaining bishop to sit apart from the white clergy at diocesan convention.; Related: The "Perpetual Colored Diaconate", Dr. Crummell's "The Black Woman of the South"
The Equilibrium Theory of Progress: Cooper's answer to the question "Has America a race problem?" — yes, and the nation should be glad of it. Drawing on Guizot's history of civilization, she argues that societies dominated by a single race or principle (Egypt, India, China) stagnated, while Europe's "continual struggle" of contending elements produced liberty and perpetual progress; peace by suppression is "the passivity of death," while "equilibrium, not repression among conflicting forces is the condition of natural harmony." America's unprecedented mixture of races therefore guarantees, rather than threatens, its development — and race prejudice, she predicts, is "the last monster that shall be throttled" in this arena.; Related: "Who Are Americans?"
The Feminine Side of Truth: Cooper's central philosophical claim in the education essay: truth has a feminine as well as a masculine side, "related not as inferior and superior... but as complements in one necessary and symmetric whole." Since the fifth century, she argues, civilization has been "like a child brought up by his father" — worshipping strength, despising weakness, and scorning "unwarlike" races — and only the higher education of women can convert the feminine force from a potential into a dynamic factor, so that a civilization dominated by neither "mere emotionalism" nor "bullyism" becomes possible.; Related: "Shall Woman Learn the Alphabet", Woman's Cause Is the Cause of the Weak
The Greek Class for Ministerial Candidates: Cooper's autobiographical illustration of how Black institutions themselves discouraged women's higher education. At the school of her childhood (St. Augustine's in Raleigh, unnamed in the text), Greek was offered only to male candidates for the ministry; a boy needed merely "a floating intention to study theology" to receive support and encouragement, while a self-supporting girl fought "positive discouragements." Cooper was admitted to the class as a favor, and later flared out at the principal that the only mission his school opened to a girl "was to marry one of those candidates." Her remedy: scholarships for women to offset the aid always available to boys who "will take theology."; Related: The Census of College-Bred Black Women, The Oberlin "Ladies' Course"
The Louisiana Native Guards at Port Hudson: The First and Third Regiments of Black troops whose assault on the Confederate works at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863 Cooper reprints from an eyewitness account as an entry in the race's ledger of payment to America. Posted at the point of honor and danger without artillery support or reserve, the regiments made six charges under "the most hideous carnage," losing over three hundred men — among them Captain André Cailloux, "a man so black that he prided himself on his blackness," who died leading his men. Cooper notes the bitter coda that when the dead were reclaimed under flag of truce, the privilege "was not extended to these black regiments." They paid their debt, she writes: "They gave — their spirits out!"; Related: "What Are We Worth?"
The Oberlin "Ladies' Course": The arrangement adopted in 1833 by the first American college to admit women — a separate, easier curriculum alongside the regular "Gentlemen's Course" for the B.A. Cooper, herself an Oberlin graduate, recounts with relish how the experiment dissolved itself: women kept choosing the gentlemen's course and performing in it, until a distinctively inferior ladies' course "did not and could not exist." She pairs the story with Matthew Arnold's anxious question about whether education "spoils their chances" in marriage, answering that educated women had simply raised the standard men must meet.; Related: "Shall Woman Learn the Alphabet", The Census of College-Bred Black Women
The Roll of Pioneer Black Women: Cooper's honor roll of Black women already at work in public life, offered as proof that the colored woman's influence, "if unproclaimed," was real: the poet Frances Watkins Harper; Sojourner Truth, "that unique and rugged genius who seemed carved out without hand or chisel from the solid mountain mass"; the evangelist Amanda Smith; educators Sarah Woodson Early, Martha Briggs, and Fannie Jackson Coppin, "pre-eminent among women of whatever country or race in constructive and executive force"; the poet Charlotte Forten Grimké; and the lecturer Hallie Quinn Brown. Their common trait, Cooper writes, is the consecration of their talents to the race's deliverance and development.; Related: A Woman Question and a Race Problem
The Separate Car Law: The state statutes requiring Black passengers to ride in separate railway cars, whose daily operation Cooper documents from her own travel as a Black woman moving through the South: conductors who hand every white woman down from the car step and fold their arms when her turn comes, waiting rooms marked "FOR LADIES" and "FOR COLORED PEOPLE" — leaving her "wondering under which head I come" — and the ever-present threat of forcible ejection. She distinguishes the courteous official enforcing an existing law from the "great burly six feet of masculinity" who growls at her to leave the car, and indicts the American woman, arbiter of the nation's manners, for the atmosphere that licenses both.; Related: "Woman versus the Indian", The "Social Equality" Humbug
The Two Classes of Authors: Cooper's framework for judging the decade's literature about Black Americans: artists who paint what they see (Shakespeare, George Eliot, Howells at his best) versus preachers with a point to prove (Milton, Carlyle, and, on the race question, Albion Tourgée, whose characters "are little Tourgees — they preach his sermons and pray his prayers"). She honors Tourgée as the race's most fervent white advocate and George Washington Cable as the South's judicial conscience, but skewers Howells's An Imperative Duty for presenting caricature as "the best colored society" on the strength of acquaintance with hotel waiters — proof that even a master novelist cannot yet "think himself imaginatively into the colored man's place."; Related: "Let the Lion Turn Painter", "A Voodoo Prophecy"
Tutti ad Libitum: The musical title of the book's second part — "all, at pleasure," the direction that frees every voice in the ensemble to enter — covering the essays on the race problem, American literature, economic worth, and belief. Where Soprano Obligato carried the woman's solo line, this section widens to the whole national chorus, with epigraphs from Browning on a People as "the attempt of many to rise to the completer life of one" and from George Eliot's Felix Holt demanding "a freeman's share... to think and speak and act about what concerns us all."; Related: Soprano Obligato

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Wimodaughsis: A Washington women's culture club — its name built from the first letters of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters — whose Kentucky secretary refused a Black schoolteacher admission to its typewriting classes and refunded her fees. Cooper acidly suggests the club rename itself "Whimodaughsis" for white mothers, daughters, and sisters. Club president Anna Shaw and Susan B. Anthony refused to sanction the exclusion and the secretary resigned, an outcome Cooper credits to their honor while using the episode to show how instinctively the color line surfaced even inside the women's movement.; Related: "Woman versus the Indian", The "Social Equality" Humbug
Woman's Cause Is the Cause of the Weak: The principle with which Cooper closes her critique of the suffrage movement's racial blind spots: "woman's cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her 'rights,' and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights." The women's movement, she argues, is a universal reform whether its leaders realize it or not — like the sixteenth-century Reformers who "builded more wisely than they knew" — and its final victory means "not the white woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong."; Related: "Woman versus the Indian", The Feminine Side of Truth