Jack L. Cooper
| Jack L. Cooper | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Jack Leroy Cooper September 18, 1888 Memphis, Tennessee, United States |
| Died | January 12, 1970 (aged 81) Chicago, Illinois, US |
| Occupation | Radio presenter, broadcasting executive, vaudeville promoter and performer |
| Known for | First African-American DJ and innovator in US radio |
Jack Leroy Cooper (September 18, 1888 – January 12, 1970) was the first African-American radio disc jockey, described as "the undisputed patriarch of black radio in the United States." In 2012, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, one of ten children of William and Lavina Cooper. He left home at the age of ten to work in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in his teens was a successful boxer and semi-professional baseball player. By 1905 he was working in vaudeville on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit as a singer and dancer, and started writing and producing sketches and stage shows, soon running his own touring troupe with his first wife. He managed at least two theaters for TOBA, and began writing for newspapers in Memphis and Indianapolis.
After moving to Chicago around 1920 he began writing theater reviews for the Chicago Defender, while attempting to break into the new radio industry as a performer. While working for the Defender in Washington, D.C. he first appeared on radio, writing and performing comic sketches on station WCAP. He returned to Chicago in 1926 and developed a proposal for a new show, The All-Negro Hour, which premiered on WSBC on November 3, 1929. The show was initially broadcast on a weekly basis, and contained live music and comedy sketches, but Cooper gradually modified and expanded its content. It became successful with both listeners and commercial sponsors and continued until 1936. By the mid-1930s, Cooper presented 9 1⁄2 hours each week on WCAP. He was one of the first, if not the first, to broadcast gramophone records, including gospel music and jazz, using his own phonograph. In 1938, he created a new show, Search for Missing Persons, designed to reunite listeners with family members who they had lost contact with. He also pioneered a mobile news team to cover items of interest to Chicago's black community.
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