Several DCSS members and friends attended the March 9 performance of Tempestuous Elements, a world premiere play that brought the life of Anna Julia Cooper to the Arena Stage. Tempestuous Elements deals with a moment in 1905 when Cooper, as Principal of the M Street School in DC, the most advanced secondary school for African Americans in the country, fought for the right of African American students to have the option of following either a vocational curriculum or the classical college-preparatory curriculum. In a scandal orchestrated by the government, her tenure as principal is sabotaged by her colleagues and neighbors leading Cooper's professional and personal relationships to become fodder for innuendo and social ostracization.
Anna Julia Cooper’s contributions to social theory, education, and the long struggle for civil rights in Washington, DC, are described in “A Washington Life: the Sociology of Anna Julia Cooper” by Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley (The Sociologist, May 2016). DCSS established the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Public Sociology by a Community Organization in 2019.
Tempestuous Elements references topics from the legacy of slavery through the unfinished work of Reconstruction to the troubled history of segregated education. It is no exaggeration to say that the issues confronting the characters on the stage in 1905 are all very much still part of our ongoing quest for democracy and justice. Numerous luminaries from the historical struggle for civil rights, including Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, join Cooper in advocating for educational equity for her students.
Read "Anna Julia Cooper’s Courageous Revolt: The History Behind ‘Tempestuous Elements’ at Arena Stage" by Emma O'Neill-Dietel on the WETA Boundary Stones website and "How the Black female head of a top D.C. school was ‘punished for leading’ " by Shirley Moody-Turner in The Washington Post opinion section.
Tempestuous Elements, written by Kia Corthron and directed by Psalmayene 24, would fit well in the syllabus of courses on the sociology of education or the history of civil rights or Washington, DC. Perhaps this new dramatization will generate interest in organizing an academic conference “in the spirit of Anna Julia Cooper.” If you would like to report on your teaching or scholarship on these topics or have thoughts about how we might present them to the DMV sociological community, please let us know at dcsociologicalsociety@gmail.com.
Image courtesy of Sally Hillsman
