Coppin, Fanny Jackson, 1837-1913

<p>Fannie Jackson was born a slave in Washington D.C. on October 15, 1837. She gained her freedom when her aunt was able to purchase her at the age of twelve. Through her teen years Jackson worked as a servant for the author George Henry Calvert and in 1860 she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin College was the first college in the United States to accepted both black and female students.</p>

<p>While attending Oberlin College Jackson enrolled and excelled in the men’s course of studies. She was elected to the highly respected Young Ladies Literary Society and was the first African American student to be appointed in the College’s preparatory department. As the Civil War came to an end she established a night school in Oberlin in order to educate freed slaves.</p>

<p>Upon her graduation in 1865, Jackson became a high school teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) in Philadelphia. Within a year she was promoted to principal of the Ladies Department and taught Greek, Latin, and Mathematics at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), a high school for African American students in Philadelphia. In 1869 Jackson became principal of the entire institute, making her the first African American woman to receive the title of school principal, a position she would hold until 1906.</p>

<p>In addition to providing African American youth with education, Jackson founded homes for working and poor women. She also was an influential columnist who defended the rights of women and blacks in local Philadelphia newspapers. Jackson added missionary work to her long list of accomplishments when she married Rev. Levi Jenkins Coppin, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on December 21, 1881. In 1902 the married couple went to South Africa and founded the Bethel Institute, a missionary school which emphasized self-help programs.</p>

<p>After a decade of missionary work, Coppin returned to Philadelphia because of declining health. Fannie Jackson Coppin died on January 21, 1913. In 1926, a Baltimore, Maryland teacher training school was named the Fanny Jackson Coppin Normal School in her memory. It is now Coppin State University.</p>

<p>Fanny Jackson Coppin (January 8, 1837 – January 21, 1913) was an American educator and missionary and a lifelong advocate for female higher education.</p>

<p>Born into slavery, Fanny/Fannie Jackson's freedom was purchased by her aunt at age 12. Fanny Jackson spent the rest of her youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts working as a servant for author George Henry Calvert, studying at every opportunity. On December 21, 1881, Fanny married Reverend Levi Jenkins Coppin, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor of Bethel AME Church Baltimore. Fanny Jackson Coppin started to become very involved with her husband's missionary work, and in 1902 the couple went to South Africa and performed a variety of missionary work, including the founding of the Bethel Institute, a missionary school with self-help programs. After almost a decade of missionary work, Fanny Jackson Coppin's declining health forced her to return to Philadelphia, and she died on January 21, 1913.</p>

<p>Throughout her youth, she used her earnings from her servant work to hire a tutor who guided her studies for three hours a week. With the help of a scholarship from the African Methodist Church and financial support from her aunt, Coppin was able to enroll at Oberlin College, Ohio - the first college in the United States to accept both black and female students - in 1860. Initially enrolling for the "ladies' course", Coppin switched to the more rigorous "gentlemen's course" the following year. She wrote about this experience in her autobiography:<br>
"The faculty did not forbid a woman to take the gentleman's course, but they did not advise it. There was plenty of Latin and Greek in it, and as much mathematics as one could shoulder. Now, I took a long breath and prepared for a delightful contest. All went smoothly until I was in the junior year in College. Then, one day, the Faculty sent for me--ominous request--and I was not slow in obeying it. It was a custom in Oberlin that forty students from the junior and senior classes were employed to teach the preparatory classes. As it was now time for the juniors to begin their work, the Faculty informed me that it was their purpose to give me a class, but I was to distinctly understand that if the pupils rebelled against my teaching, they did not intend to force it. Fortunately for my training at the normal school, and my own dear love of teaching, tho there was a little surprise on the faces of some when they came into the class, and saw the teacher, there were no signs of rebellion. The class went on increasing in numbers until it had to be divided, and I was given both divisions. One of the divisions ran up again, but the Faculty decided that I had as much as I could do, and it would not allow me to take any more work."</p>

<p>She also recalled the pressure she felt under as a black woman: "I never rose to recite in my classes at Oberlin but I felt that I had the honor of the whole African race upon my shoulders. I felt that, should I fail, it would be ascribed to the fact that I was colored. At one time, when I had quite a signal triumph in Greek, the Professor of Greek concluded to visit the class in mathematics and see how we were getting along. I was particularly anxious to show him that I was as safe in mathematics as in Greek. I, indeed, was more anxious, for I had always heard that my race was good in the languages, but stumbled when they came to mathematics. Now, I was always fond of a demonstration, and happened to get in the examination the very proposition that I was well acquainted with; and so went that day out of the class with flying colors."</p>

<p>During her years as a student at Oberlin College, she taught an evening course for free African Americans in reading and writing, and she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 1865, becoming one of only three black women to have done so by this time (the others were Mary Jane Patterson and Frances Josephine Norris).</p>

<p>Jackson Coppin was the first black teacher at the Oberlin Academy. In 1865, she accepted a position at Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania). She served as the principal of the Ladies Department and taught Greek, Latin, and Mathematics. In 1869, Jackson Coppin was appointed as the principal of the Institute after the departure of Ebenezer Bassett, becoming the first African American woman to become a school principal. In her 37 years at the Institute, Fanny Jackson was responsible for vast educational improvements in Philadelphia. During her years as principal, she was promoted by the board of education to superintendent. She was the first African American superintendent of a school district in the United States, but soon went back to being a school principal. In 1893, Coppin was one of five African American women invited to speak at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, with Anna Julia Cooper, Sarah Jane Woodson Early, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Hallie Quinn Brown, where she delivered a speech entitled "The intellectual progress of the coloured women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation".</p>

<p>Born a slave in the nation’s capital, the child Fanny was purchased by an aunt. Another aunt took the little girl in, but Fanny had to go out and work as a domestic, getting schooling whenever she could. By age fourteen, she was supporting herself in Newport, Rhode Island, and struggling for education. “It was in me,” she wrote years later, “to get an education and to teach my people. This idea was deep in my soul.” She attended Rhode Island State Normal School and then Oberlin College, where her achievements were amazing. She was the first black person chosen to be a pupil-teacher there. In her senior year, she organized evening classes to teach freedmen.</p>

<p>After her graduation in 1865, Fanny Jackson was appointed to the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker school in Philadelphia. Within four years, she became head principal, from which position she influenced two generations of young people. In a letter to Frederick Douglass in 1876, she explained her commitment: “I feel sometimes like a person to whom in childhood was entrusted some sacred flame…This is the desire to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation; no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him. I want to see him crowned with strength and dignity; adorned with the enduring grace of intellectual attainments.”</p>

<p>Her school was centered on this dream. She expanded the curriculum to include an Industrial Department, established a Women’s Industrial Exchange to display the mechanical and artistic works of young women, and founded a Home for Girls and Young Women to house workers from out of town. Moreover, she persuaded employers to hire her pupils in capacities that would utilize their education.</p>

<p>In 1881, she married Rev. Levi J. Coppin, a prominent A.M.E. minister, and together they were a driving force in Black America. She continued her work at the school but added missionary work to her interests. Mrs. Coppin retired from her beloved school in 1902 at age 65 and began a new career. She accompanied her husband, now a bishop, to Cape Town, South Africa, where she was an effective missionary, counseling African women. She returned to Philadelphia in 1907, broken in health but not in spirit. In her last years, she completed her autobiography, Reminiscences of School Life, which remains a record of a remarkable life. Fanny Jackson Coppin died in 1913 at age 76. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was her influence on her students. She prodded them toward excellence. She made them dream. She made them become more than they ever thought they could. Frances (Fanny) Marion Jackson Coppin was, indeed, a model of academic excellence—both in her life and in the heritage that she has bequeathed to those who followed.</p>