Anna Julia Cooper believed that the education of Black women was the key toprogressing the future of America in the 1880s and the work she did helped women of color get where they are today today.

In her first book, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, Cooper tells us, “I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.” Despite this feeling, Cooper constantly voiced her beliefs because she believed her voice—and the voices of Black women in general—were imperative to affecting and inspiring the development of a moral authority in the United States of America.

Cooper worked to advance education for Black Americans, co-founded the Colored Women’s League amongst other organizations, and practiced what she preached by getting both her BA and Masters in Mathematics, as well as completing a PhD in history at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

She is the mother of modern black feminist theory—she saw the need for women’s education, especially black women, as a vehicle to societal advancement.

She also uplifts all intersections of women in a call to action to unite. “It is not the intelligent woman versus the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman versus man. Nay, tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice,” Cooper is noted to say in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper.

Her legacy lives on. In 2012, Melissa Harris-Perry founded The Anna Julia Cooper Center, whose mission is to “advance justice through intersectional scholarship.” Something that we can all aim to do by educating ourselves on different perspectives, everyday.