Mary-Louise Hooper

Who was Mary-Louise Hooper?

Mary-Louise Hooper was a wealthy American heiress and civil rights activist and anti-apartheid activist, whose brief imprisonment in Johannesburg, South Africa and subsequent exclusion from South Africa in 1957 was a cause célèbre both in South Africa and the USA. Hooper was the first white member of the African National Congress, and was described by its National Executive as "one of our number, and a leading worker in the struggle for freedom and democracy", and was one of the ANC's three delegates to the first All-African Peoples' Conference in December 1958 in Accra, Ghana, and one of only two American observers at the Third All-African Peoples' Conference in Cairo, Egypt in March 1961. Hooper was also active in the NAACP, the American Friends Service Committee, and was the West Coast representative of the American Committee on Africa from 1962 until about 1969. Hooper was the editor of the South African Bulletin from 1964 to 1968.