In this talk, Shirley Moody-Turner discusses her biography-in-progress on Anna Julia Cooper, trailblazing Black educator, intellectual, and activist, who fought to maintain and expand Black access to higher education.  She explores what was at stake in the battle over Black higher education at the turn into the twentieth century and shows how the national ascendency of Jim Crow segregation played out in the local politics affecting the lives of Black Washingtonians. Her talk charts how this struggle propelled Cooper’s own journey to become one of the first Black women to earn a doctoral degree, while also documenting the collective strategies she and her contemporaries enacted to respond to the assault on Black higher education.