The most influential accounts of Anna Julia Cooper's work have tended to focus on the question of women's equality. In this respect Mary Helen Washington credits Cooper with providing an "embryonic feminist analysis" in the 1890s. The focus of the author is on her understanding of educational matters, which should be seen as a powerful inaugural formulation of an anti-racist pedagogy, detailing the concomitant understanding of the interconnection of race, gender, and class that others have built upon. Education was often the vehicle she used to exemplify the particular exclusion and marginalization of black women, linking the uplift of the race to the higher education of girls. In this essay, the author wants to consider the historic terms of engagement between race and education and to assess their meaning against the pedagogic imperative of Cooper's avowal of her life's work as "the education of neglected people." The author believes that her declaration synthesizes and adumbrates the underlying and explicit program for action in contemporary black struggles for education.