Marvel Cooke: Investigative Journalist, Communist and Black Radical Subject

I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work. Where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under boiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor.¹

–Marvel Cooke, The Daily Compass

Ella Baker’s and Marvel Cooke’s article, “The Bronx Slave Market,” is one of the most widely cited essays on the urban black female experience during the interwar period. Published in November 1935 in The Crisis, the article delineated the impact of the Great Depression on New York City African American domestic workers. Desperate and impoverished, black domestics sold their labor to the highest white bidder on the corners of 167^th Street and Jerome Avenue and on Simpson and Westchester Avenues in the Bronx. Cooke and Baker, both well known and respected New York City activists and writers, disguised themselves as domestic laborers, setting out to expose the horrors of the urban slave market. They became part of what Cooke and Baker called the “paper bag brigade,” and like other members of the “brigade” waited “in front of Woolworth’s [Store] for “housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent rate of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, or, if luck with them, thirty cents an hour.”² “The Bronx Slave Market” was shaped by the authors’ concern with the exploitation of working poor African American women, as well as increasing working class protests against poor housing and high rent and food prices in New York City during the 1930s. Exposing the plight of laboring black women, “The Bronx Slave Market” had a profound impact on New York City activists, politicians, and residents and on African Americans across the nation. African American and white activists including Anna Hedgeman, Dora Jones, Dorothy Height, and community groups such as the Bronx Citizen’s Committee for the Improvement of Domestic Employees and the Domestic Worker’s Union (DWU) actively worked to eliminate the city’s infamous street corner markets by offering black domestics alternative employment opportunities and by placing their labor experiences at the center of New York City politics.³ Versions of the widely read “The Bronx Slave Market” were reprinted in Harlem’s New York Amsterdam News (NYAN) in 1937 and later in The Daily Compass in 1950. Moreover, Cooke’s and Baker’s thought provoking editorial motivated Federal Writers’ Project employee and journalist Vivian Morris to pose as a domestic worker and uncover how black women “hustled to find work” in 1938, and inspired Louise Mitchells’s 1940 Daily Worker editorial entitled the “Slave Markets Typify Exploitation of Domestic.”⁴

Much is known about “The Bronx Slave Market” and its co-author Ella Baker, prominent 1950s civil rights leader, whom scholar William Chafe identified as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Several scholars and activists including Joanne Grant, Vicki Crawford, Howard Zinn, and more recently Barbara Ransby have explored Baker’s extensive political activism and her influence on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights organizations. In his 1964 book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, historian and civil rights activist Howard Zinn described Baker as “the most tireless, the most modest, and the wisest activist I know in the struggle for human struggle.” Leading Ella Baker biographer Barbara Ransby notes that the civil rights heroine “advanced a political tradition that is radical, international, and democratic. Her life gives us a sense of the connections and continuities that link together a long tradition of African American resistance.” Cooke also praised Baker’s commitment to racial advancement, regarding her as a “new kind of Negro woman, [who] was tough, smart, and out to make a difference.”⁵

Little, however, is known about Baker’s equally impressive collaborator, Marvel Cooke. Cooke was one of the nation’s most influential African American female journalists of the early and mid-twentieth century. She wrote...