Fannie Coppin

Soon after becoming the nation’s first African American female school principal, Fanny Jackson Coppin wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass, telling the statesman and abolitionist of her dreams for her new position and for her race:

“This is the desire to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation,” she wrote, “[to] no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him.”

Coppin worked diligently to realize her goals.

In 1865, she accepted a teaching position at Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheney University of Pennsylvania) and in 1869 was appointed principal of the Institute, becoming the first black woman nationally to serve as a high school principal.

Coppin introduced a “normal-school” department at the Institute, an innovative program that trained students to become teachers, and within a few years, enrollment in teacher training far exceeded expectations.

She stayed at the Institute for 37 years before being promoted to superintendent of Philadelphia schools, becoming the country’s first African American superintendent of a school district.

Students should study hard

Coppin’s philosophy was that students should study hard, and not rely solely on work of dedicated teachers for their success.

“I am always sorry to hear that such and such a person is going to school to be educated,” she said. “This is a great mistake. If a person is to get the benefit of what we call education, he must educate himself, under the direction of the teacher.”

Born a slave in 1837 in Washington, D.C., the former Fanny Jackson’s freedom was bought by her aunt when she was 12. The two moved to New Bedford, Mass., where Coppin worked as a servant, using her earnings to hire a tutor for three hours a week.   

After receiving a scholarship from the African Methodist Church, Coppin enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1860. The college was one of the first schools nationwide to accept black and female students.

"The faculty did not forbid a woman to take the gentleman's course, but they did not advise it,” she wrote in her autobiography. “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.”

In her junior year at Oberlin, Coppin was informed that chosen upperclassmen would teach preparatory classes. Before she began teaching, the faculty warned her that if students “rebelled against [her] teaching, they did not intend to force it.”

“Fortunately for my training at the normal school, and my own dear love of teaching, 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,” she said.

In fact, enrollment for her class increased so much, the school divided the students into two classes — and Coppin taught both. She also taught free reading and writing classes in the evenings for blacks while at Oberlin. Coppin graduated in 1865.

She married the Rev. Levi J. Coppin, who later became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Coppins travelled to Cape Town, South Africa, in the early 1900s, and for the next decade she worked among the native black women, organizing mission societies and promoting temperance, as well as founding the Bethel Institute, a missionary school with self-help programs.

Coppin returned to Philadelphia in 1911 and died in 1913. In 1926, the High and Training School of Baltimore was renamed the Fanny Jackson Coppin Normal School, now Coppin State University.