“My main question is, why didn’t I know about her until this play?”

It’s a Friday evening in the palatial cafe at Arena Stage, and local director Psalmayene 24 is asking the same question I’ve been pondering since learning about Dr. Anna Julia Cooper. A trailblazing Black educator, scholar, and proto-intersectionalist, Cooper is the subject of Kia Corthron’s new play, Tempestuous Elements, premiering at Arena this month under Psalmayene’s direction. The three of us, along with star Gina Daniels, gush over a woman who has flown under the historical radar for too long.

“This is a child who was born into slavery,” says New York-based playwright Corthron. “She was a child when emancipation came, and what she did was extraordinary.” For Corthron, Cooper’s legacy comes back to education, a subject the playwright herself was researching for a different work when she came across Cooper. In her, Corthron found not only an esteemed—if sometimes controversial—educator who made her mark in D.C., but also a scholar weighing in on the biggest debates in Black liberation circles at the turn of the 20th century. 

In the play, approximately half of which I got to observe getting on its feet in an Arena rehearsal hall, Daniels’ Cooper engages directly with the work of her contemporaries W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Their opposing views of Black progress—Du Bois pushed for immediate political action in pursuit of civil rights, while Washington argued that Black Americans should temporarily accept discrimination while building material wealth through racial solidarity and self-help—endure today. As the play illustrates, Cooper was not only a participant in this discourse, but an early contributor. “What [Du Bois] was espousing in terms of education, she was doing before him,” says Corthron, referring to Cooper and Du Bois’ shared belief in higher education and the collective pursuit of civil rights. “People think of it as a Du Bois and Booker T. Washington argument, but she preceded Du Bois.”

Cooper’s philosophy on Black freedom and advancement was brought to bear on her four-year tenure as principal of D.C.’s M Street High School from 1902 and 1906. At the time, M Street High catered to Black students; it later evolved into Dunbar High School.

In 2019, Arena approached Corthron about a commission for the theater’s Power Plays series, its 10-year and 25-play commitment to new works about American identity and politics. Seeing the opportunity to tell a D.C.-specific story, Corthron felt Cooper’s time leading M Street was a natural fit for the series. 

It’s also an opportunity to spotlight a period of Cooper’s life that is much admired by those in the know. As Angela T. Tate, women’s history curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, notes, Cooper’s leadership proved her “a pioneer in how Black children were educated in Washington, D.C.” As seen in Tempestuous Elements, Cooper advocated for a classical education rich in the humanities (contrary to the trade school pathway supported by Washington) and held her students to a very high standard. Many blossomed under her tutelage, going on to excel among their peers across D.C. and earn degrees from prestigious institutes of higher education.  

As both Tate and Corthron are quick to note, however, Cooper’s short stint as principal may have been fruitful but it was also extremely difficult. Early in the play, Cooper faces down a White school board bureaucrat who objects to the “unrealistic” standards to which Cooper holds her students. It’s characteristic of the institutional resistance Cooper faced when she refused to teach a watered-down “colored curriculum.” It was not the last time Cooper would face off against stubborn, prejudiced leadership.

While Cooper’s tenure at M Street was suitably dramatic, it is only one chapter in a truly astounding life. Cooper was born into slavery in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, and died in D.C. in 1964. Think about that: She came into this life three years before the advent of the Civil War and left it a few months before the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Along the way, she challenged gender discrimination at Raleigh’s Augustine’s University and later at Oberlin College, founded and participated in various social and political organizations such as the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association, earned a doctorate from the highly prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris in 1925 (making her the fourth Black woman in the United States to earn a doctorate), and served as president of Frelinghuysen University, a private school for Black adults in D.C. 

It’s no surprise that history weighs heavy in Tempestuous Elements. Undeterred by her battle with the administration, Cooper later quizzes her precocious students on the significance of Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire as it pertains to the United States’ own imperialist proclivities. Later, Cooper laments how quickly her pupils try to shrug off the horrors of slavery that they never experienced. Having seen the broken promises of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, she knows this generation cannot afford to blind themselves to the past.

The contemporary resonances of the play come through loud and clear. For Psalmayene, it’s part of the point. The D.C.-based playwright-director finds himself midway through a series of history-based projects, which includes last fall’s premiere of his play Monumental Travesties at Mosaic Theater Company and the long-running H Street Oral History Project, also at Mosaic. While the sequence was not intentional, he believes it’s no accident. “Right now, I think people have a real thirst for the truth, and history tends to be connected with the truth,” he says. “History and the truth are under siege. I think that’s why we’re seeing more plays that are rooted in history.”

Despite being marginalized in the record, Cooper’s influence on history can be felt today. Perhaps her most significant contribution is a collection of speeches and essays from 1892 titled A Voice from the South, a priceless source text from which Corthron drew the play’s title. It’s a work that helped shape Black feminist thought as we know it today, partly by openly contending with misogyny in Black liberation circles and racism in the overwhelmingly White suffragette movement. 

“I hope the play captures Cooper as an intellectual and how she struggled against the demands of gender- and race-based propriety,” notes Tate, for whom A Voice from the South remains prescient today. “Black women have been vanguards of social justice, scholarship, and community-building, but are undervalued and discounted by society,” Tate says. “However, as Cooper argued, the unique nexus of being Black and being a woman provided a framework for liberation that emphasized uplifting girls and women alongside boys and men.” Interrogating that nexus helped lay the foundations for what we now understand as intersectionality. 

Of course, for all her achievements, Cooper was still human, and the team behind Tempestuous Elements has taken care to embrace that. “Oftentimes, when actors play really horrible people, they get questions like, ‘Gosh, how do you play that person?’” says Daniels. “The answer is, I don’t judge the person I’m playing, I just go for the action. That question doesn’t come up in the opposite, but it’s the same answer.” Apart from accusations of elitism, Daniels sees Cooper’s force of personality as a source of complications in its own right. “While I believe she’s doing what’s best for the students, there is a rigidity [there.] Personally, I think that’s her steely spine that allowed her to accomplish all those things, but it’s certainly the uncompromising nature that has its drawbacks.”

Uncompromising she may have been, but Corthron and company have also found room for delicate touches. The real-life Cooper lost her husband, George A.C. Cooper, after only two years of marriage. She never remarried, but the play—at least what I saw of it—hints at the affections such a passionate and accomplished woman likely earned. We also get a peek into the integrated salons Cooper hosted in her home. At one point, friends tempt her over to the piano to play a piece by Schumann—Clara Schumann, she is quick to clarify, not the composer’s more famous husband, Robert. It’s a nice shout-out to another brilliant woman whom scholars and advocates have had to draw out from the shadows of men.

While a degree of creative license is always at play in drama, the trio is quick to note that the aim of Tempestuous Elements is to let Cooper speak for herself as much as possible. Throughout its developmental process—which, appropriately for its title, has been waylaid by everything from the global COVID-19 pandemic to January’s snow flurry—Corthron has kept to the core story while deferring to the facts. Any significant changes, of which there have been relatively few, have been made in light of new information. It suits a play that speaks to belatedly giving Black women the credit they’re due, as Psalmayene asserts, and fulfills Corthron’s continuing interest in the fate of Black education. 

For Daniels, who’s “madly in love” with the woman whose shoes she is walking in, it’s all about giving Cooper the bow she deserves. “I’m just so glad that Anna is getting her flowers,” she beams.

Tempestuous Elements, a play about Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, written by Kia Corthron. and directed by Psalmayene 24, runs through March 17 at Arena Stage. arenastage.org. $41–$115.