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One of my privileges for working with the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship was to get to know Marvel Cooke.
Marvel was already in her 80's when I first met her (born in 1903), but still had the beauty that had been so striking when she was younger, as seen in this photo from the book by Rodger Streitmatter, "Raising Her Voice: African-American women Journalists Who Changed History" (University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
Marvel's life is described in the Streitmatter book, and even more extensively in a 160-page oral history by Kathleen Currie, of which I have a copy. The Currie history was commissioned by the Washington Press Club Foundation as part of its oral history project, Women in Journalism. It is now available on the internet.
Marvel had come from Minneapolis to Harlem in 1926 as the assistant to W.E.B. DuBois, the great African-American sociologist, social activist (founder of the NAACP), and later, communist party member. She had been engaged while in Minnesota to Roy Wilkins, later the head of the NAACP, but she broke off the engagement to marry the champion quarter-miler of the world at that time, Cecil Cooke, a Jamaican. Wilkins later married her sister instead.
Traveling to and from the many meetings of the National Board of the Friendship Council, and later when I would make the pilgrimage to Harlem, as a side trip on my way to and from UNESCO in Paris, Marvel would recall the rich network of friends that she had in the Harlem rennaissance, partly because her house was a social center, partly through the many interviews she conducted as a journalist, and partly because of her activism with the Communist Party, of which she was still a member (although ignored by the Party hierarchy). Marvel still lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, the house built by Babe Ruth so he could see across the river to Yankee Stadium, and which had housed at various times not only DuBois, but also Walter White and Roy Wilkins, past presidents of the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme court and William Patterson of the Communist Party, all of whom had been her friends at the time. Paul Robeson, with whom Marvel was very close, was a frequent visitor.
Working as a reporter for the Amsterdam News in the 20's and 30's she got to know a Who's Who of American culture: in addition to those mentioned above, there was Lloyd Brown and Vita Barsky, Nora Hall, Zora Hurston, James and Esther Jackson, Judge Bruce Wright, Mary McCleod Bethune, singers Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Leontyne Price, writers Claude McKay, James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, George Murphy and Richard Wright, musician Dizzy Gillespie, dancer Catherine Dunham, painters Romare Beardon, Jake Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett (paintings by Elizabeth hung in Marvel's apartment), actors Fredi Washington, James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis and John Randolph, athletes Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, congressmen Benjamin Davis and Adam Clayton Powell, and Communist activist Angela Davis, for whom Marvel served as the head of her Defense Committee.
Here is a photo of Marvel with me and Lindsay and our friends Joan and Barry Cohen, taken at a restaurant in Manhattan. Barry, at that time, was the editor of the Communist Party newspaper, the Peoples Daily World. Later, at the Party convention in 1991, when he was part of the dissident group, he asked me if I could help mediate, but it was too late and the Party was split down the middle, Barry being one of those who left.
In 1987 Marvel and I were asked by the Communist Party and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship to find a new, high-level Chairman for the Council. First, Alan Thomson and I approached Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, who received us graciously at their beautiful home in Mount Vernon, but who told us that they were devoting all their political efforts to ending apartheid in South Africa. Then, Marvel and I approached the famous actor John Randolph, whom Marvel had known over the years with his wife Sarah Cunningham.
John was lonely as Sarah had died not long before and he agreed to come up to 409 Edgecombe where Marvel and I tried to recruit him as the new Chairman. To our great delight, he agreed, and we would see him often over the next few years at meetings of the Council's Executive Board, to which he gave great service. Below is a photo I took of him in a Broadway restaurant where is is posing in front of a portrait.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme