Anna Julia Hayward Cooper, Educator, 1964

Most of the saints in the lectionary seem to be somewhat mythical, priests, male, dead at least 1000 years, and mainly white (though there are exceptions on the latter point). Anna Julia Hayward Cooper was none of these. At a time when in many places women could not graduate from university, she headed one. Her mother was a slave and her father possibly her mother's owner. She insisted that African American students could do just as well as their white counterparts in school and university, and she was the fourth black woman ever to gain a PhD.

I recently attended the PhD examination and graduation ceremony of a friend and colleague in the Netherlands. Like Cooper, my colleague is a pioneer. She was the first ever PhD from her country to graduate from her university. She had to face many difficulties - mainly financial - during her studies, but was bolstered by the belief in herself that her parents had given her. Cooper is one of those people that hopefully can instill that kind of self-belief in women and minorities. If such pioneers can complete their education despite opposition and hardships, then it is an obligation in some senses on the rest of us not to let them down.

"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity."