Cooke worked during a time when black writers, artists and musicians were being celebrated - the Harlem Renaissance. With a talent for poetry and creative writing, and a college degree in English, she worked as a literary journalist, weaving beautiful stories from her investigative journalism.
Although Cooke was smart, and surrounded by many creative black people, she experienced racism. Her best friend stopped speaking to her because she was black, and when she was hired as a Spanish translator because her test scores were so high, she was made a file clerk when the government discovered she was black. However, she also learned to fight back. She protested her reassignment at the translator job, and a senator helped her get her original job back. When she got out of college, she wanted to work and live where other people were fighting for civil rights, so she moved to Harlem in New York City. She first worked at black publications such as the Crisis and the Amsterdam News, writing arts reviews.
But since Cooke was surrounded by so much talent, she often wrote about her peers. She did profiles on black women singers and black poets and playwrights, because she felt that if blacks could form a national identity through the arts, it would help the fight for civil rights. Besides working for black publications, Cooke was the first black woman to work as a full-time reporter for a mainstream newspaper, at the Daily Compassin 1950. There, she wrote shocking stories such as going undercover in the "Bronxslave market," which referred to the many black women who waited on the streets for someone to hire them for a few hours to clean or do laundry. Another investigative series looked at drug use among black children.She also fought for labor reform through her work in organizations, and she formed writers groups for black authors. As of 1993, she was still living in the same apartment she'd moved into in 1926 in her beloved Harlem.
Cooke loved immersing herself in the arts. She read, listened to music, studied art, and went to plays. She felt that black people in the arts contributed things that were lacking in the regular arts, because the stories and art and music of black people reflected their life experience. Do the books you read talk about the author's life? Would an Asian-American author write about different topics than an African-American would? Or do some things apply to all people's lives? Some people write or paint or sing about things everyone can relate to, while others purposely create art for a certain audience. Look at different kinds of books, music and art, and see if the artist's racial or ethnic background influenced what they created.