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.