Coppin, Fanny Marion Jackson1837╨1913educator and missionaryBorn a slave in Washington, D.C., in 1837, Fanny Jackson was bought into freedom by an aunt while still a small girl, and she grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island. She determined to get an education and ,while employed as a domestic servant, studied on her own to win admission to the Rhode Island State Normal School. In 1860 she entered Oberlin College. While there she taught in the preparatory department. On graduating in 1865 she took a job teaching Latin, Greek, and mathematics at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, where she served also as principal of the girls╒ high school department. In 1869 she became head principal of the Institute; she was the first African-American woman in the country to hold such a position, and she lost little time in exerting great influence on the course of the school. In 1871 she introduced a normal-school department, and within a few years teacher training had far exceeded the classical course in enrollment. To the ordinary work of teacher training she added a practice teaching system in 1878. In 1889, after a ten-year campaign of convincing the school╒s managers and raising funds, she opened an industrial training department offering instruction in ten different trades. Education in both academic and vocational fields was to her equally a moral and a practical matter and a central tool in the struggle to end discrimination against her race. After a period of ill health Jackson resigned her post with the Institute in 1902. (The Institute was moved to Cheyney, Pennsylvania, in 1904 and became a state normal school in 1920 and Cheyney State College in 1951.) In 1881 she married the Reverend Levi J. Coppin, who in 1900 became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church. In 1888 Coppin served as president of the Women╒s Home and Foreign Missionary Society of the A.M.E. church and was a delegate to the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World in London. In 1902 the Coppins sailed for Cape Town, South Africa, and over the next decade she worked tirelessly among native black and ╥colored╙ women in that country, organizing mission societies and promoting temperance. She also founded the Bethel Institute in Cape Town. After her return to the United States she settled again in Philadelphia, where she died on January 21, 1913. In 1926 the High and Training School of Baltimore was renamed the Fanny Jackson Coppin Normal School (now Coppin State College) in her memory. åstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ ' 5¬ @ !I δ 5¬ ∞ !I link `
