Undercover Reporting

In January 1950, Marvel Cooke, the first black and only woman reporter on the staff of The New York Compass, did a reprise of a series she had done for The Crisis in 1935 with Ella Baker -- the first time this method of employing women emerged. Cooke, alone this time, posed as a domestic worker seeking employment by the hour or for a day on a Bronx street corner, where women gathered to find some kind of employment to find out what working through the "slave mart" system meant for those forced into it.

Journalism that required costuming or even physical transformation by reporters reporting on racial, ethnic, gender or social groups not their own.

Reporters encounter or inhabit the lives of very hard-laboring others.

Marvel Cooke began her journalistic career in 1926 working with W.B. Dubois, editor of NAACP magazine, The Crisis. There, she and Ella Baker first investigated the 'Bronx Slave Market' in 1935-- a series she later reprised alone at the New York Compass as the publication's first Black and only woman reporter.