She served on the Board of Education in Washington D. C., the second African-American woman after Terrell to hold that appointment. Additionally, she spent five years as Director of the Home for Colored Children and Aged Women in Washington, D. C. Franklin Cook and Terrell became prominent leaders among elite African-American women and the Black Women's Club movement. They were early members of one of the oldest Black women's clubs, the Colored Women's League of Washington, which eventually merged with other groups to form the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Franklin Cook was active in the woman's suffrage movement. She and Terrell were active members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and part of the association's inner circles. Terrell and Franklin Cook appealed to the NAWSA hierarchy because they were educated, professional, middle-class women. In short, they represented the "intelligent" women Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues hoped to enfranchise. She was also a member of the Coleridge Taylor Choral Society, and was elected president of the Washington Artists' Association. She spent five years as head of the Home for Colored Orphans and Aged Women in Washington D. C. Later in her life she served as a member of the Council of Social Welfare. Speeches and presentations Franklin Cook was a powerful public speaker. She was the only African-American woman invited to give an official statement at Susan B. Anthony's 80th birthday celebration at the Lafayette Opera House in 1900. Her address praised the movement for encouraging women to recognize their potential political power and their responsibility to one another, and emphasized the necessity interracial empathy. She stated, "no woman and no class of women can be degraded and all woman kind not suffer thereby." She was disheartened, however, because she felt as if the cause of African American women was not a priority among white women active in the suffrage movement. She insisted that the elite white women do not ignore the political rights of those that were less fortunate. In fact, she addressed Anthony directly, stating,"...and so Miss Anthony, in behalf of the hundreds of colored women who wait and hope with you for the day when the ballot shall be in the hands of every intelligent woman; and also in behalf of the thousands who sit in darkness and whose condition we shall expect those ballots to better, whether they be