As is true of the great majority of our really eminent Afro-Americans, Mr. Cooper is a southern product; but early in life, without money or friends, yet full of pluck and ambition, he selected the North for his future home and field of operations. From the South, he went to Philadelphia; and from thence he turned his attention to the setting sun, selecting Indianapolis, the Hoosier metropolis, as his permanent home. Here he entered school and graduated first in a class of sixty-five, all being white, save himself.
In 1882 we find him in the United States railway mail service, soon becoming one of the most efficient men in that difficult and exacting branch of government work, having gone from class 5 to 1, at the time of his retirement from the service. In 1886 he had full charge of his car, being the only Afro-American that ever had a corps of white clerks under him.
In the spring of 1883, though still in the government service, he, in connection with Edwin F. Horn and others, began the publication of The Colored World, issued at Indianapolis. The venture was a success from the beginning, but owing to a change of "runs," Mr. Cooper was compelled to sever his connection with the paper, and a stock-company then took hold and ran it.
Leaving the government service in 1886, he once more connected himself with The World, then, as now, known as The Indianapolis World, and from a puny weakling, head over heels in debt, run without system or method, with a half-paid circulation of less than five hundred, within six months he booked a bona fide circulation of two thousand, on a solid and paying basis. One year later, selling out his interest, he left it one of the best equipped, best paying, more widely read and clipped newspaper, than any other that had been published in the Union by colored men up to this time. He then began the publication of The Freeman.
