Cooper died at age 105 in Washington, D.C., having lived from slavery through the early Civil Rights era.
Anna Julia Cooper died on February 27, 1964, in Washington, D.C., at the remarkable age of 105 (or 106, by some counts, given uncertainty over her exact birth year). Her death came just months after the historic March on Washington in August 1963, meaning she lived long enough to witness the early triumphs of the modern American Civil Rights Movement she had helped lay intellectual groundwork for decades earlier.
Cooper's life spanned an extraordinary arc of American history: born into slavery before the Civil War, she lived through Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow segregation, both World Wars, and into the dawn of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Her funeral was held at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, and she was buried in the City Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, the city of her birth.
At the time of her death, she was recognized as one of the most accomplished Black educators and intellectuals of her generation, though wider public recognition of her contributions would grow substantially in subsequent decades as scholars rediscovered and championed her work, particularly A Voice from the South.
Her legacy has only grown since her death: she has been honored on a U.S. postage stamp, quoted by First Lady Michelle Obama, and is now widely regarded as a foundational figure in Black feminist thought and intersectional theory, decades before those terms were coined by later scholars.