"Marvel Jackson Cooke"(April 4,1903-November 29,2000)

Was a pioneering American journalist,writer,and civil rights activists.Marvel was the first African-American woman to work at a mainstream white-owned newspaper.She was born in Mankato,Minnesota,to Madison Jackson and Amy Wood Jackson was

raised  in an upper-class white,white neighborhood in Minneapolis,where her family moved in 1907.Her daddy was an Ohio State University law school graduate who was unable to find employment being an African American lawyer;her mama was former teacher who once lived on a Native American reservation.In 1925 Marvel graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in English at the age of 22.She was offered a job as assistant to W.E.B. Du Bois,editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis,and in 1926 moved to New York City,settling in Harlem,during the Harlem Renaissance.Her ability as a writer recognized by W.E.B.,who put her in charge of a column in the magazine,where her brief included writing critiques of works by the literary giants of the day,including Langston Hughes,Zora Neale Hurtson,and Dorothy Parker.Mentored by W.E.B.,she became friendly with leading writers and artists,including Paul Robeson,Countee Cullen,Elizabeth Catlett and Richard Wright.Marvel broke off her engagement to (later NAACP) Roy Wilkins because she thought he was too conservative.In 1928,sent to work on the New York Amsterdam News,where Marvel was the first female reporter in their 40-year history.In 1929,she married Jamaican-born Cecil Cooke a graduate of Columbia University,who was the world's fastest quarter-miller.when she met him;their marriage would last until is death in 1978.After marrying,they moved to Greensboro,North Carolina,where Marvel taught history,English & Latin in the high-school department of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College.Returning to New York and the New York Amsterdam News,in 1931,Marvel helped found the first chapter in New York of the Newspaper Guild and was involved in strike action at the News,joining the picket 11 weeks when the editorial workers union was locked out;the strike finally ended on Christmas Eve 1934.Marvel disliked the crime reports she was assigned by the News,finding distasteful the paper's handling handling of such stores,and preferring to expand the paper's coverage of the arts,-for instance,traveling at her own coast to cover Marian Anderson's historic open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.Marvel eventually left the paper for good in 1937,in protest over a sensational headline("killed Sweetheart,Slept with Body).From 1940-1947 she worked on the People's Voice (a weekly owned by Adam Clayton Powell),as assistant managing editor.In 1950 she was hired by the New York paper The Daily Compass,becoming the first African American woman to serve as a reporter for a mainstream white-owned newspaper;at the Marvel was also the only woman employed there,as well the only African American journalist.The following year,to highlight the exploitation of African American domestic workers in white homes she got herself hired along with others seeking work by the day and then described her experiences in a compelling five-part series for the daily for the Daily Compass entitled "The Bronx Slave Market",which was promoted with signs that said:Read:I was a Slave,by Marvel Cooke.She remained with the paper until its closure in November 1952.While working at the Amsterdam News in the 1930s,Marvel not only helped create a local chapter of the Newspaper Guild,the labor union of newspaper journalist,but held union meetings in her home and subsequently participated in an eleven-week strike,during which she joined the Communist Party.In the 1950s,she served as New York director of the National Council of Arts,Science and Professors.In 1953,when she was called twice to testify her involvement with the Communist Party before Senator Joseph McCarthy,in New York & Washington DC,she pleaded the Fifth Amendment.She volunteered as national legal defense secretary of the Angela Davis defense Fund in 1971.In her later years Marvel became national vice-chairman of the American-Soviet Friendship Committee.She died of leukemia in New York.