Mary-Louise Hooper

Mary-Louise Hooper (March 2, 1907 – August 14, 1987) was a wealthy American heiress and activist in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-apartheid movement. She served a brief imprisonment in Johannesburg, South Africa and subsequent exclusion from South Africa in 1957 and became a cause célèbre both in South Africa and the United States. 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 (AFSC), and was the West Coast representative of the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) from 1962 until about 1969. Hooper was the editor of the South African Bulletin from 1964 to 1968.

Early life, family and education

Mary-Louise Fitkin was born on March 2, 1907, in Swampscott, Massachusetts, the only daughter and second oldest child of Susan Norris Fitkin (1870–1951), an ordained pastor in the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, and later the founding president of the Nazarene Women's Missionary Society (now Nazarene Mission International), and Abram Edward Fitkin (1878–1933), a former evangelist and pastor who had become a businessman. Mary-Louise had three brothers: Abram, Willis "Bud" and Ralph.

Mary-Louise attended the Church of the Nazarene with her family. By the end of 1907 Mary-Louise Fitkin, her parents, and brother, Raleigh, moved to Brooklyn because of her father's increased business activities. In 1907 the Fitkin family attended the John Wesley Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene located at the corner of Saratoga Avenue and Sumpter Street, Brooklyn, then pastored by William Howard Hoople.