The video for my reunion to Pablo didn’t work in the last newsletter. If you want to see it—here it is!

Anna Julia Haywood, born into slavery in or around 1858, gained her freedom at age 9, became one of the most important intellectuals of her generation, and spent her life articulating ideas about oppression that wouldn't get a formal name for another century. 

She was a teacher, a scholar, an activist. She earned her bachelors and masters from Oberlin, her PhD from the Sorbonne at age 66, and wrote what's now recognized as the first book-length work of Black feminist theory.

And most people have never heard of her.

In 1892, Cooper published a book called A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman in the South. In it, she posed a question to make visible what most couldn't name.

Picture yourself standing on a train platform in North Carolina. There are two waiting rooms. One door reads: "FOR LADIES,” the other: "FOR COLOURED PEOPLE."

You're a Black woman. Which door is for you?

You're both a “lady” and a Black person, but the signs don't account for that. You must choose one identity, and in so doing abandon the other.

Cooper would describe this impossible choice as "like trying to liberate the body politic by means of a lawsuit, 'Eye vs. Foot.'" You can't sue your eye on behalf of your foot. They're parts of the same body. Severing one doesn't free the other; it just kills you both.

When Cooper chose the room she felt fit her—Ladies— railroad personnel threw her out despite having a first-class ticket in hand. They threw her out for being Black. Yet, was she not also a woman? The spaces themselves were designed to split you in half.

Nearly a century later, in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw would name what Cooper had already described: intersectionality.

Intersectionality means that different parts of your identity, like race and gender, don't exist separately. They overlap and interact to create experiences that can't be explained by looking at just one identity at a time.

At that train station: White women were recognized as “ladies” deserving protection and courtesy. Black women weren't seen as “ladies” at all; their womanhood didn't grant them the same status or treatment. A Black woman doesn't experience life as "Black" in some moments and "woman" in other moments. She's always both at once, and that combination creates specific forms of discrimination and specific barriers that are unique to her; different from what Black men face and different from what white women face.

It took 97 years for Cooper's thinking to get a name.

Why do we talk about intersectionality like Crenshaw invented it, with barely a mention of the Black woman who spent her whole life describing exactly this?

It’s because that’s how erasure works.

Cooper didn't just argue that Black women should be included in conversations about race and gender. She argued that Black women's perspective was essential to understanding how oppression actually worked.

"Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'"

Cooper took on white feminists for their racism. She took on Black male leaders for their sexism. And she did something even more sophisticated: she argued that all oppressions were interdependent. You couldn't dismantle one while keeping the others intact. The liberation, if it came, had to be total.

This should be foundational. Instead, it took a century to get a name. And even now, most people don't know Cooper said it first.

We imagine public erasure as a spectacle: book burnings and witch trials. But it’s most enduring legacy is slower; a protracted seep, like carbon monoxide leaking through institutions, disciplines, and memory.

One of the earliest laws in recorded history, from 2400 BC, said a woman who speaks out of turn should be hit with a brick. The understanding that women's voices are dangerous is as old as law itself.

In 1870, Matilda Joslyn Gage identified how women were systematically erased from science. A century later, historian Margaret Rossiter documented it so thoroughly she named it: the Matilda Effect. Women who were celebrated in their time disappeared from history. Often on purpose. Often by historians who had reasons to forget them.

Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1842. She was called a "translator" of Charles Babbage's work for over a century.

Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 was critical to discovering DNA's structure. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without her explicit permission. Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 (shared with Wilkins). Franklin had died in 1958 at 37.

She wasn't mentioned in the award. Her contributions were minimized for decades.

Recent scholarship suggests the "stolen data" narrative might be oversimplified, but the fact remains: the men got the prize and the fame. Franklin's work was barely acknowledged.

Cooper described intersectionality in 1892.

Crenshaw named it in 1989.

If all women get erased, Black women get erased twice.

White feminism excluded Black women (and it still does). The suffrage movement fought for women's vote while deliberately denying Black women a platform. Some suffragettes were openly racist (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony!) When feminism won, white women benefited. Black women didn't.

Black liberation movements excluded women. The fight for racial justice centered Black men while ignoring what Black women faced. When civil rights were won, Black men got access to power. Black women still didn't.

Black women stood at the intersection. They should have had double membership. Instead they had double exclusion.

They faced something neither movement could see: an oppression that wasn't just sexism, wasn't just racism, but something more insidious that didn't even have a name yet.

To be Black and female in America, scholars Tamara and Maya Anderson wrote, "means that you are ignored, silenced, and sometimes erased."

Cooper understood that to be black and female in America was to be ignored, silenced and often erased. She understood this because she lived it. Then, she described it, and everyone forgot.

In January 2026, the “Department of Justice” released files on Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking operation. The Epstein Files “Transparency” Act was supposed to expose the full scope of his crimes and who enabled them.

But that’s not what happened.

Victims' names and identities were exposed. Men's names were redacted. Nude photos of young women appeared with faces visible. At least 43 victims' full names were revealed—more than two dozen were minors when they were abused. Names appeared over 100 times in the documents. Home addresses were searchable. Banking information was disclosed. One victim got death threats.

Meanwhile, victims' statements to the FBI naming "rich and powerful men who went to Epstein's island, who went to his ranch, who went to his home and raped and abused underage girls" remained redacted. Representative Ro Khanna saw the unredacted files. That's how we know.

Lawyers for 300 Epstein survivors called it "what may be the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history."

A law designed to expose a trafficking network exposed the victims instead. Protected the perpetrators.

What, you might be asking do Anna Julie Cooper and the Epstein Files have in common?

Everything.

Both reveal a system run by men, for men, that erases and silences women who tell the truth.

Cooper threatened the system by showing how multiple oppressions worked together. She couldn't be fully visible because her framework indicted everyone at once: white feminism, Black male leadership, white supremacy, patriarchy, the church. So her name got omitted, and her insights went unnamed for a century.

The Epstein victims threaten the system by naming powerful men who participated in abuse. They can't be protected because their testimony threatens too many people. So their identities get exposed. Their abusers stay hidden. Their safety gets sacrificed to protect men's reputations.

In both cases, the vulnerable get exposed while the powerful stay protected.

The pattern is obvious once you're willing to see it: When women tell the truth to power, power silences them, erases them, or sacrifices them.

Cooper saw the whole system from where she stood, and she called it out. It’s not that no one listened, it’s that those in power, those who could facilitate change, didn’t care.

It’s two hundred years later, and the pattern continues.

I think about Cooper writing A Voice from the South. She knew white feminists wouldn't listen. She knew Black male leaders wouldn't hear her. She knew her church would ignore her.

She wrote it anyway.

She died in 1964 at 105 years old.

She lived through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two World Wars, the beginning of Civil Rights. She saw some things change. But she never saw her work properly recognized. Never saw the term "intersectionality" coined. Never saw her insights given a name that would let them travel.

The truth is, as much as things have changed, the systems remain largely the same. The structures that erase women, are being wielded in the halls of power, in the same place they were used when she was alive.

That’s nearly 200 years.

Men often ask why women don’t always report sexual abuse when it happens, not realizing they’re asking the wrong question to the wrong person.

The right question is self-directed: “Why don’t I believe them when they do?”

Until next week, I will remain…