Coppin, Fanny Jackson

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Coppin, Fanny Jackson

1837
January 21, 1913

The educator Frances "Fanny" Jackson Coppin was born a slave in Washington, D.C. When she was approximately twelve years old, her freedom was bought for $125 by her aunt Sarah Orr Clark, who saved the purchase price from her $6-a-month salary. Coppin went to live with another aunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but felt she was a strain on her relative's limited resources. At the age of fourteen, she went to live as a domestic servant with a white couple, using her salary to pay for a private tutor and piano lessons. In 1859 she entered the Rhode Island State Normal School in Bristol. From 1860 to 1865 she attended Oberlin College, where she earned a B.A. and was named class poet at graduation. While at the college, Coppin had sixteen private music students and established an evening adult-education class for freed blacks, which she taught voluntarily four nights a week. The publicity she received for this class prompted Oberlin to name her a student teacher for preparatory classes. She was the first African-American student named to this position.

In 1865 Coppin became principal of the girls' division of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (later known as Cheyney State College). The institute had been founded in 1837 by the Society of Friends to counter anti-abolitionist claims that blacks were incapable of acquiring a classical education. In 1869 Coppin was named principal of the entire institute, becoming the first black American female to head an institution of higher learning.

In 1889 the institute opened an industrial department, for which Coppin had vigorously campaigned because she wanted to train black men and women in the technical skills and trades from which they were often excluded by trade unions. In her 1913 autobiography, Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching, she wrote, "In Philadelphia, the only place at the time where a colored boy could learn a trade, was in the House of Refuge, or the Penitentiary!"

Coppin actively campaigned to earn women the right to vote. She wrote a column for the Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. After her retirement in 1902, she traveled with her husband, an AME minister, as a missionary to South Africa. Coppin State College in Baltimore is named in her honor.