Annie Lee Cooper did the unthinkable – she hit back – an act of protest that made her an icon in the suffrage movement.
On January 25, 1965, Cooper was standing in line to register to vote when, according to historical records, Dallas County, Alabama, Sheriff James Clark ordered her home and clubbed her on the back of the head with a baton. . Cooper, a 224-pound woman, turned and punched Clark in the face, sending him to the ground.
At the time, black Americans were campaigning throughout the South for equal voting rights. Voter registration procedures like poll taxes, literacy tests, limited office hours, and long queues in states like Alabama made it nearly impossible for Blacks to register to drop out. promissory note.
Cooper was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder for punching the sheriff, according to Selma Times Magazine. She was released from prison after just 11 hours for fear that Clark would try to hurt her, the newspapers reported.
A photo of deputies pinning Cooper to the ground was published by The New York Times, and news of the incident quickly spread in the civil rights community, which celebrates her as a hero.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. admitted Cooper in a historic speech when she was jailed.
“Here’s what happened today: Mrs. Cooper was in that line, and they didn’t tell the press the truth about it,” King said, according to the Selma Times Journal. “Mrs. Cooper isn’t going to go back and hit Sheriff Clark just to hit. And of course, as you know, we teach a philosophy of no retaliation and no hitting back, but the truth of the situation is Mrs. Cooper. , if she did anything, was provoked by Sheriff Clark. At the time, he was engaging in some very ugly business as usual. This is what has yielded. that scene there.
Cooper died in 2010 at the age of 100, and in 2014, Oprah Winfrey played her in the Academy Award-nominated film, Selma.
Selma leaders say her legacy lives on.
Yusuf Salaam, a former Selma councilor and state representative, said he met Cooper in the 1990s when he represented her neighborhood on the city council. The two worked together on a committee aimed at improving the relationship between residents and city leaders. Salaam describes Cooper as warm, shrewd, and intelligent. He recalls visiting her house several times when she cooked broccoli and sweet potato pie.
Salaam told CNN he believes Cooper promoted the suffrage movement because she stood up against a white sheriff — something many black Americans fear doing in the Jim Crow South.
“It’s risky, it’s life-threatening and dangerous,” Salaam said. “But she came up with a recipe for success. If people maintain that fear, they will be paralyzed.”
An earlier title on this story misspelled Annie Lee Cooper’s birth year. It was 1910.
