Ann Nixon Cooper

Cooper was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, on January 9, 1902, and raised in Nashville.[1] She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in her early twenties with her husband, Albert Berry Cooper, a dentist,[1] and they had four children together.[2] During that time, she served more than fifty years in public work on the board of Gate City Nursery Association and also helped found the Girls Club for African American Youth.[3] Because there were no integrated Boy Scout troops in 1930's Atlanta, she wrote to the Boy Scouts in New York for help in starting Troop 95, Atlanta's first Boy Scout troop for African Americans.[4] When her husband died, Martin Luther King, Jr. sent Cooper a telegram; she also met with Coretta Scott King and saved photographs of the occasion.[5] Cooper first registered to vote on September 1, 1941. Though she was friends with elite black Atlantans like W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin and Benjamin Mays, she didn't exercise her right to vote for years, because of her status as a black woman in a segregated and sexist society.[6]
During the 1970s, she served as a tutor to non-readers at Ebenezer Baptist Church. She also served on the Friends of the Library Board, serving at one time as vice president of the board. In 1980 she received a Community Service Award from Channel 11 for being one of the organizers of the black Cub Scouts and serving as the first den mother for four years.
She was also awarded the Annie L. McPheeters Medallion for community service from the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in