  Historically, Anna Julia Cooper was directly and indirectly engaged in debates about ideas related to race, gender, progress, leadership, education, justice, and rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with race men like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington as well as activist women such as Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell. These debates transpired not only through speeches and writings (including public essays and private letters), but also at major meetings like the Hampton Conference (1892), the Chicago World’s Fair (1893), and the Pan African Conference (1900)—to give only a few examples.