Mercer Cook

Will Mercer Cook was born on the thirty-first of March 1903 at Washington, D.C., the son of the composer Will Marion Cook — the principal late-nineteenth-century Black-American Broadway composer of the Clorindy and the Hottentots companies — and Abbie Mitchell (placed in this archive), the soprano of the original Clorindy 1898 cast and the original Porgy and Bess 1935 cast.

He was raised in the Manhattan-Harlem of the Cook-Mitchell theatrical household across the closing years of the Black-Broadway period of the early twentieth century.

He was placed at the Phillips-Exeter Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire for the closing years of the secondary education and at Amherst College, completing the bachelor’s at Amherst in 1925 cum laude — Phi Beta Kappa.

He took the doctor of philosophy in romance languages at Brown University in 1936 — the first African American to receive the Ph.D. in romance languages from Brown — and at the same time held the position of instructor of French at the Atlanta University from 1927 to 1936.

He was hired in 1936 by Howard University as instructor of romance languages and rose by 1945 to chair of the Department of Romance Languages. He held the Howard chair for thirty-four years until his retirement in 1970.

He directed at Howard across the period the principal Black-American romance-language graduate-programme of the post-war period — predominantly the training of the Black diplomatic-and-academic French-and-Spanish-speaking professional cadre of the post-1945 African-affairs Foreign Service generation.

He was named in 1953 the principal Black-American Fulbright lecturer at the University of Paris and at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop at Dakar — the first African American Fulbright lecturer at sub-Saharan Africa.

He translated across the closing years of the 1940s and the 1950s the principal Léopold Sédar Senghor (placed in this archive) and Aimé Césaire (placed in this archive) into English — predominantly the Senghor poetry collection Hosties noires (1948), Senghor’s collected poems Ethiopiques (1956), and Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1955). The Cook translations were the principal English-language Senghor-and-Césaire translations of the period and are the foundational documents of the Négritude reception in the English-speaking world.

He was nominated by President John F. Kennedy on the eighteenth of August 1961 as Ambassador to the Republic of Niger and was confirmed by the Senate on the twenty-fifth of August 1961. He presented his credentials at Niamey on the twenty-fifth of September 1961.

He was transferred in 1964 to the Ambassador to the Republic of Senegal and the Islamic Republic of the Gambia by President Lyndon Johnson — the first African American Ambassador to Senegal — and held the Senegal Embassy from 1964 to 1966 across the principal years of the post-independence Senghor administration.

Cook’s personal friendship with Senghor — the principal Senegalese president of the period and the principal francophone-African intellectual of the post-war period — gave the Cook Senegal Embassy an unprecedented direct-access to the Senegalese government on the principal United States foreign-policy questions of the period.

He returned to Howard University in 1966 and continued the Howard chair through 1970.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the fourth of October 1987 of natural causes, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the principal Black-American Senghor translator.