Born: 2 June 1910, United States
Died: 24 November 2010
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Annie Lee Wilkerson
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Annie Lee Cooper was born in Alabama in 1910 into the world of Jim Crow laws that prevented African Americans from voting and a sharecropping system designed to keep them in poverty and tied to the land and white landowning families that only a generation or two before would have enslaved them. It wasn’t until she moved to Kentucky at age 14 that she saw people who looked like her going to the polls.
Cooper returned to Selma in her 50s to care for her sick mother. Having registered to vote when she lived in Kentucky and later Ohio, she fully intended to do so again. Yet when she tried, she was told she had failed the literacy test—not surprising, as such tests were deliberately designed so that most people would fail them. Other Jim Crow measures included poll taxes that the often-impoverished African American citizens could not afford, while so-called “grandfather clauses” exempted white voters because their grandfathers had been able to vote.
Cooper had been working with the Dallas County Voters League, organized years earlier by Amelia Boynton and her husband, as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She tried to register again. And again. And again. This went on for years. “Once I stood in line from seven a.m. to four p.m., but never got to register,” she later recalled. She was among the 400 people who turned out on October 7, 1963 for a SNCC event where African American residents went to the Dallas County courthouse en masse to try to register to vote. They stood in line for hours under the hot Alabama sun. When her employer saw Cooper and her co-worker, Elnora Collins, there, he fired them, attempted to take Collins’s photo to have her blackballed with other employers and, after she refused to pose, hit her with a cattle prod. All 40 of his other African American employees left in protest. Although white Selma employers blacklisted the women, Cooper was eventually able to get a job at the African American-owned Torch Motel.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Selma in early 1965, using the city to bring national attention to the issue. Cooper was once again in line at the county courthouse attempting to register on January 25, 1965 when police arrived to disperse the activists. “Nobody’s afraid of them,” Cooper said. Jim Clark, the notorious racist sheriff known for using cattle prods on peaceful protestors, began jabbing her in the neck with his billy club. So, the 54-year-old Cooper spun around, swung a hard right hook, and knocked Clark to the ground. She was immediately assaulted by his deputies, arrested, and charged with criminal provocation.
“I try to be nonviolent,” Cooper told Jet magazine a few weeks later, “but I just can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing all over again if they treat me brutish like they did this time.”
The event would later be included in the Oscar-winning 2014 film Selma, with Cooper played by none other than Oprah Winfrey. (See the directors section for more on that film.) With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Jim Crow measures were made illegal and Clark was voted out as sheriff the following year. Cooper lived to be 100, and has a street named after her in Selma.