Marvel Jackson Cooke
- Hayeon Kwak
- Dec 8, 2023
- 4 min read
the bosses are not necessarily in your corner, even if they are your own color." - Marvel Jackson Cooke
Name: Marvel Jackson Cooke
DOB: April 4, 1903
Nationality: American
Marvel Jackson Cooke’s birth was a born pioneer.
Her birth in Mankato, Minnesota, marked the first African American birth in the city. She was the first African American to attend a public school in the city of Minneapolis. Perhaps it was this challenging childhood that made Jackson the inspiring trailblazer she was by the end of her life to thousands of people.
Marvel Jackson Cooke was born in 1901 in Mankato, Minnesota. Her father, Madison Jackson, was an educated lawyer from Ohio State University Law School and the son of a free farmer. Yet, because of racist hiring practices, he was forced to give up his dreams and hard work and become a railroad porter. Later, Jackson and her family moved to the city of Minneapolis a completely white neighborhood. The Jackson family’s arrival shocked the residents of Prospect Park. The community organized public meetings and various intrusive attempts to force the family to leave, but Jackson’s parents stood firm.
Jackson was the first again when she desegregated Sydney Pratt Elementary School as the first African American student to attend. Perhaps due in part to her familiarity with racism in addition to her outgoing and courageous nature, Jackson easily made friends she felt comfortable with. However, interracial friendships were still tarred by the effects of a racist community. When Jackson’s childhood best friend ignored their friendship in front of her boyfriend rather than explain their relationship during her time at the University of Minnesota, Jackson knew it was time to leave Minneapolis. She wanted to find a black community she could belong in. She found her future home in Harlem, a city of vibrant culture and most importantly, black communities.
With a degree in English and a city she felt at home in, Jackson thrived. In 1926, she worked as an editorial assistant for renowned black intellectual and sociologist W.E.B DuBois at the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. In her time working for a black-owned newspaper, Jackson came to realize that race doesn’t always unify people as one family. Jackson organized a successful eleven-week strike at the paper, famously stating “the bosses are not necessarily in your corner, even if they are your own colour.” The tense political climate of aggressive black power riots and the civil rights movement did not blind Jackson or cloud her political opinion, and she always fought for what she believed in.
But Jackson’s most well-known work wasn’t her work as an editorial assistant or as a courageous leader in an oppressed workplace, but her shocking work as an investigative undercover journalist of the “Bronx slave market.” When the market crashed in 1929, black women who had previously been employed by rich white families as help for decent wages and treatment, were suddenly out of jobs. Unemployed white and immigrant women from struggling families flocked to domestic service jobs, increasing competition for black women and lowering wages. Jackson went undercover during the Great Depression in the streets of the Bronx, writing about the low, “slave wages” white housewives offered desperate black women looking for domestic jobs. Jackson and her partner, Ella Baker, famously recorded the shocking working conditions of the “domestic slaves,” as women were “permitted to scrub floors on her bended knees, to hand precariously from window sills, cleaning window after window, or to strain and sweat over steaming tubs of heavy blankets, spreads, and furniture covers.” Even after all of their hard work, women would be forced to leave homes empty-handed without the promised payment, Jackson and Baker wrote in their series, The Bronx Slave Market.
Jackson and Baker’s expose, The Bronx Slave Market was widely-read and impactful. The previously overlooked exploitation of Black women in the field of domestic service was finally brought to attention and people took action. Activists of any race and community organizations began to offer black domestic workers improved employment opportunities with better wages and conditions to collectively end the “slave market.” Jackson and Baker’s short series also caught the attention of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who ordered an investigation into the “slave market.” Once the shocking conditions were confirmed, LaGuardia organized “hiring halls,” offering improved access to job opportunities in neighbourhoods most plagued with the “slave markets.”
Years later, Jackson would write new pieces while undercover alone for the Daily Compass, I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market, to bring back the public’s drifting attention to the economic exploitation, the physical toll of domestic work, and sexual abuse from employers. At the time, Jackson was the first African American to write for the white-owned newspaper, the Compass. Jackson’s impressive career as a journalist paved the way for African-American journalists after her, empowered individual women, and brought real changes to an exploitative labour system prejudiced against black women.
Jackson passed away in Harlem on November 20, 2000 from leukaemia at the age of ninety-nine. Even until she was sick, Jackson spent her final years as a politically active journalist. Marvel Jackson Cooke’s career paved the way for African-American journalists, women, and social change. Her life serves as a testimony that anyone can enact change, no matter their race or gender.
Written by Hayeon Kwak
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