About: 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