  In the early African American philosophical canon, activist-intellectuals like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois tend to be the more readily recognized philosophical figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States than Anna Julia Cooper and other Black women scholars and activists from this era who are largely overlooked. The canonization of Black men of this period is evidenced by book-length scholarly publications produced throughout the 1990s such as Leonard Harris’s The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (1991); Howard Brotz’s African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 (1992); Howard McGary and Bill Lawson’s Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (1993); and Howard McGary’s Race and Social Justice (1999). Certainly, the works of prominent philosophers who write about this tradition have made it possible even to describe an area of philosophy called “African American Philosophy.” Unfortunately these early contributions to African American philosophical discourse frequently ignored the philosophical contributions of African American women including Cooper. Fortunately there is at least one exception to this exclusive focus on men, specifically Joy James’s Transcending the Talented Tenth (1996) in which Anna Julia Cooper figures prominently beside W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. James notes the ways in which Cooper argued for a bottom up rather than a top down approach to leadership and standard of measurement for liberation. Rather than focusing on Black intellectual male elites, Cooper asserted that we must pay attention to the conditions of working class and poor Black women. This position offers an ethics of the oppressed consistent with many Black feminist philosophies and also comparable with Continental figures like Jean-Paul Sartre who makes similar claims  decades   later.[5]