Annie Lee Cooper, (1910-2010) the Selma, Alabama, native played a crucial part in the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement. But it wasn’t until Oprah played her in the 2014 Oscar-nominated film “Selma” that people really took notice of Cooper’s activism. She is lauded for punching Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark in the face, but she really deserves to be celebrated for fighting to restore and protect voting rights.
She was born in 1910, when the cotton bales that made Selma “the queen city of the Black Belt” still shipped south by steamboat on the Alabama River. While white Selma flourished on cotton’s bounty, Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers labored on plantations in conditions barely distinguishable from slavery. In 1901, Alabama’s newly passed disenfranchising constitution purged Black voters from the rolls using poll tax and literacy requirements, and Annie Lee grew up never giving a thought to the idea that Black people could vote. It was only when she moved to Kentucky as a fourteen-year-old to live with her ill sister that she saw Black people going to the polls. She wanted to vote herself, but she was too young to do so at the time.
Annie Lee had registered to vote when she lived in Kentucky and Ohio, and she told her friends and neighbors that she intended to vote in Selma as well. But when she tried to register, the registrar told her she failed the test. She tried often. “Once I stood in line from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., but never got to register.” Annie Lee had already begun working with the Dallas County Voters League, organized years earlier by Amelia Boynton and her husband, and she joined the fledgling SNCC effort as well.