Introduction
This paper compares Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography and Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, two books written almost a decade apart but the similarities of the themes in the two works indicate that there has been change in the position of African American women but against a background of change. Anna Julia Cooper was born in 1858 in North Carolina while the enslavement of Africans was still legal in America and was a young girl during the civil war that led to the abolition of slavery. According to Moody-Turner (6), Cooper has long been acknowledged as an early female voice drawing attention to the specific challenges faced by African American women and their unique outlook on the struggle of African Americans as a group for equality and justice in the United States. Her first book was A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, published in 1892 is “widely recognized as a foundational text of black feminist thought” (Moody-Turner 6) and has indeed been hailed as one of the first articulations of Black feminism.
Main body
A Voice from the South contained essays that covered a range of topics including racism, the socioeconomic realities of African American families, women’s rights, segregation, and literary criticism. At the beginning of the book, Cooper focuses on education and articulated a vision of African American self-determination by way of education and social uplift. The main position in the book is that the educational, moral, and spiritual progress of African American women is a key tool for improving the general position of the entire African American community. Since women are fundamental to “the regeneration and progress of a race,” Cooper argues for women to be given full access to education. From this basis Cooper argued that it was the duty of educated and otherwise successful African American women to support disadvantaged women in achieving their goals. She also expands her discussion to include all women, and argue for the right of women to vote given that female participation in the electoral process will lead to “the supremacy of moral forces of reason and justice and love in the government of the nation.” In terms of segregation, she argues that this is bad for America as a whole, not just African Americans, since segregation adversely impacts American intellectual and artistic life.
Born in 1947, Assata Shakur grew up in a very different time from Cooper. Shakur was a young woman in the 1960s and 1970s in America when the struggle for African American empowerment and civil rights began. Her autobiography was published in 1987 at a time when she had escaped prison in America and was living in political asylum in Cuba, as she continues to do today. During the 1960s and 1970s, Shakur became a member of the Black Panther party and later became a leader in the Black Liberation Army. Her autobiography focuses on how she grew up and particularly serves as an introduction to the context and substance of revolutionary African American politics in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as being her personal account of racism and political repression in America. According to Henry Christol
The book reads like the making of a black revolutionary in the United States. It is in the mainstream tradition of militant memoirs and autobiographies that can be traced back to some slave narratives…. At the same time it is unique because it weaves together the motives of race, gender, and class in ways which are rarely found in such texts. (133)
Like Cooper, Shakur takes the position that African American women are the key to the upliftment of the race as a whole. Additionally, Shakur’s autobiography provides a narrative of many of the same issues covered by Cooper. For example, Christol (136) notes that “[m]ost of the episodes of childhood, adolescence, or formative years [in Shaku’s autobiography] can be viewed as ‘cover messages’ related to racism and class and gender oppression.” For example, in the books she writes:
Every day when we drove from the house on Seventh Street to the beach, we passed a beautiful park and zoo. And every day I would beg, plead, whine, and nag my grandmother to take me to the zoo… Finally, with the strangest look on her face, she told me that we were not allowed in the zoo. Because we were black.
However, Christol (136) highlights the fact that “positive elements also play a role in the history of her identity-building process” such as the influence of her grandmother. Shakur writes in her autobiography: “I was to be polite and respectful to adults, but when it came to dealing with white people in the segregated South, my grandmother would tell me menacingly, ‘Don’t you respect nobody that don’t respect you, you hear me?’”
In the second half of A Voice from the South, Cooper examines how various have represented African Americans in their work and concludes that an accurate depiction of African Americans had not yet been penned. She thus exhorted African American authors to step up to this challenge: “What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro’s standpoint.” Shakur is among a number of authors to meet this challenge, as Christol (138) highlights that she “severely criticizes official white American history… Indeed, the book gives a radical inverted version of American history, which revises standard elements in it, questions the cannons, and uncovers forgotten slave revolts and black rebellions.”
Cooper examines the role of African Americans in America’s economy as well and argued that African American were poor because of their heritage of being enslaved. However, she argued that in spite of this disadvantaged beginning in America, as well as the vigorous resistance to African American’s gaining economic power, significant progress had been made in this realm. Bringing back her emphasis on education, Cooper again reiterated that she thought education was the best way for African Americans to gain prosperity. In her book, while Cooper is not as radical as Shakur in her actions, Karen Johnson (45) sees Cooper as an educator-activist and sociocultural theorist, arguing that Cooper’s perspectives on education, race, and class were radical commentaries on American democracy and racial oppression in a time when segregation was legal.
There are many similarities in the works of these two women. First, Cooper specifically identifies several strategies to overcome the race, class, and gender issues she had identified. She focused on education, particularly the full access to education of African American women, as well as on women’s right to vote. While Shakur does it in a different way, Christol (133) argues that Shakur’s “essential goal is to define specific strategies of liberation,” which is what Cooper also does. Indeed, the goal of Shakur’s autobiography book is clear as “the personal narrative transforms the main actor into a character that can work as a model for the group’s liberation” (Christol 138). So while Shakur talks from an individual perspective, she is seeking to define strategies to overcome the race, class, and gender issues just like Cooper.
Second, despite their trials, both women maintain a voice of hope and freedom. Christol (140) writes of Shaku’s autobiography: “There is no self-pity, no whining. Obstacles only make her stronger; she is never a victim.” Similarly, Cooper does not argue that African American could not gain economic independence for a variety of reasons; instead she acknowledges the obstacles and outlines ways in which they can be overcome. Third, both of these women seem to understand the limitations of the groups with which they were working. Some of these limitations may be externally imposed, such as poverty faced by African Americans because of their enslavement in America. Other limitations were internal to the organization, such as the disorganization and lack of training in the Black Liberation Army.
Works Cited
Christol, Henry. “Militant Autobiography: The Case of Assata Shakur.” Black Liberation in the Americas. Fritz Gysin and Christopher Mulvey (Eds.). London: Lit Verlag, 2003. 133-142.
Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Johnson, Karen. “In Service for the Common Good: Anna Julia Cooper and Adult Education.” African American Review, 43 (2009): 45-56.
Moody-Turner, Shirley. “Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice Beyond the South.” African American Review, 43 (2009): 6-8.
Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 1987.