Tempestuous Elements, a play currently on at Arena Stage, takes place at the turn of the 20th century, when a Black educator named Anna Julia Cooper found herself in the crossfire of a contentious debate about how and what Black students should learn.
There are some historical discrepancies about dates in Cooper’s life, but according to The Portable Anna Julia Cooper, she was born into slavery in North Carolina five years before the Emancipation Proclamation. After earning a master’s degree at Oberlin College in 1887 alongside her classmate and lifelong colleague Mary Church Terrell, she came to DC to teach mathematics at the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth, colloquially known as M Street High School—the first Black public high school in the nation. In 1902, Cooper officially took over as principal.
As the new century dawned, a disagreement over pedagogy roiled the Black educational establishment. The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois advocated for well-rounded, liberal arts-based education, while the equally prominent Tuskegee Institute director Booker T. Washington stressed the importance of vocational studies. Cooper, a friend of Du Bois, felt that students could benefit from both forms of study, which brought her into conflict with the white-run DC Board of Education that favored Washington’s approach. After Cooper refused to abide by the city’s limitations, local educational leaders began to target her career, reproaching her administrative methods and accusing her of being a poor disciplinarian. She was replaced as principal in 1906 after the Board of Education voted not to reappoint her.
Tempestuous Elements starts in 1905, as Cooper holds her own in the middle of this storm of controversy. Even as the success of both her and her students is undermined by outside forces, the show depicts Cooper as an impressive leader, who rejects the status quo and prioritizes education above all else. In her note at the beginning of the playbill, Arena Stage Artistic Director Hana S. Sharif said Cooper’s story from over a century ago still feels relevant today, specifically mentioning Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black President who resigned from her post last year in a sea of public pressure and accusations.
“[Cooper] felt that every child was owed an education, and that they should be able to make choices about their own education,” says Kia Corthron, whom Arena commissioned to write Tempestuous Elements. “If they wanted to be a medical doctor or a mechanic, either of those options should be open to them.”
Corthron was born in Maryland and was dismayed to realize she hadn’t learned Cooper’s story earlier. “I was just shocked to find that there was this incredible Black woman who’d done great, selfless work for over 100 years, and I’d never heard of her,” she says, despite the fact that Cooper wrote A Voice From the South, a foundational work of early Black feminism.
After her principalship ended, Cooper spent a few years as a professor in Missouri, retuning to M Street School to teach Latin in 1910. In the summers, she traveled to New York and Paris to work on her doctoral thesis, and eventually earned a Ph.D in 1925, when she was 66. She was only the fourth Black woman from the United States to do so. In 1930, she left M Street and became the president of Frelinghuysen University, a now-closed Black institution in Washington where she helped create a model for the modern community college, providing diverse educational opportunities for working-class students of all ages. She stayed involved with the school until around 1950, and even operated it out of her own own home on T Street in LeDroit Park when extreme financial burdens forced it out of its original location at 1800 Vermont Ave. She died in 1964, at the age of 105, in her DC home.
“She really loved DC, and came back to it throughout her life,” Corthron says. And while Cooper may not be a household name, her ideas continue to travel–one of her quotes adorns every US passport: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind. The very birthright of humanity.”
Tempestuous Elements is on at Arena Stage until March 17th. You can buy tickets and find more information here.
