Mercer Cook

Will Mercer Cook was born on the thirtieth of March 1903 in Washington, D.C., the son of the celebrated composer Will Marion Cook — the principal late-nineteenth-century Black-American Broadway composer, whose Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk broke ground in 1898. He was raised in a household of exceptional artistic and intellectual accomplishment, and he carried that inheritance into a life of scholarship and public service.

A scholar of French and Francophone letters, Cook joined the faculty of Howard University, where he taught romance languages across several decades — as assistant professor from 1927 to 1936 and as full professor from 1945 to 1960, later heading the department of romance languages from 1966 to 1970. He championed the writers of Africa and the Caribbean, and in 1959 he translated into English the work of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who would become the first president of Senegal.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy named Cook United States Ambassador to the Republic of Niger, a post he held until 1964. He then served as Ambassador to the Republic of Senegal, and in 1965 became the first United States Ambassador to the newly independent Islamic Republic of the Gambia, holding the two commissions concurrently until 1966. In these young nations he oversaw economic aid, the Peace Corps, and cultural exchange.

He died on the fourth of October 1987 in the city of his birth. A bridge between American letters and the awakening literatures of Africa, Mercer Cook honored both his father's legacy and a wider community of thinkers he helped the world to read. May his learning and his dignity endure.