Cooke, Marvel Jackson

Impact on the world

Cooke and fellow activist Ella Baker first investigated the exploitation of Black domestic workers who gathered on Bronx street corners seeking day labor in a 1935 essay for The Crisis titled “The Bronx Slave Market”; Cooke revisited the subject alone in 1950 as a five-part undercover series for the Daily Compass that led the Domestic Workers Union and the New York State Employment Agency to create new protections for household workers. Her 1950 investigation “From Candy to Heroin,” documenting Black children’s drug use, prompted New York City to launch a dedicated addiction-prevention program. At the Amsterdam News in the early 1930s she helped organize the paper’s first Newspaper Guild chapter and walked an eleven-week picket line during a labor lockout, and in 1953 she was twice called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee over her Communist Party membership, where she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights.

Life & background

Born Marvel Jackson on April 4, 1903, in Mankato, Minnesota — reportedly the first Black child born in that city — to a mother who had worked on a Native American reservation and a father who could not find legal work despite an Ohio State law degree, Cooke earned a B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1925 before moving to Harlem in 1926 to work as an assistant to W.E.B. Du Bois at The Crisis. She became the Amsterdam News’s first woman reporter in 1927, married champion sprinter Cecil Cooke in 1929, joined the Communist Party in 1936, worked at Adam Clayton Powell Sr.’s People’s Voice from 1942 to 1947, and reported for the Daily Compass from 1950 until its 1952 closure, after which she devoted herself largely to left-wing activism; she died of leukemia in Harlem on November 29, 2000, at age 97.

Sources

1. American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Communist Party USA; African American Registry