Anna Julia Cooper

Speaking as one of the few women at the Pan-African Congress conference in London, 1900, founding the Colored Women’s YWCA in 1905, and pushing W.E.B Du Bois to write Black Reconstruction are only three of Anna Julia Cooper's achievements. Sure, when you live to be 105, you can set your sights high, but in an era of progressive depravity when it came to race and gender, Cooper's position as one of America's formidable scholars and educators is no small feat.