Spelman Independent Scholars Videos

Women of Wisdom: Ann Nixon Cooper's Legacy

Four years before President Barack Obama mentioned 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper as embodying the spirit of his victory, Spelman Independent Scholars had dubbed her the "Wisest of the Wise."

Mrs. Cooper, the wife of the first Black dentist in Atlanta, was one of the dozens of African-American women elders whose stories were recorded and archived in the first 10 years of the SIS interdisciplinary independent study program at Spelman.

Other elder mentors include a woman who never got out of poverty after being one of 13 born to a sharecropper in Albany, Georgia. They have common stories, said SIS founder, Gloria Wade Gayles, Ph.D. “We're trying to establish that there are common stories in the memories of African-American women across lines of class."

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