Charles C. (Charles Chauveau) Cook

Born in Washington, D.C., Charles C. Cook studied at Cornell University alongside his cousin Jane Eleanor Datcher and graduated in 1890. Cornell records identify Cook and Datcher as the first African Americans to complete a four-year course of study there, placing him among the university's earliest Black graduates.

Cook went on to teach at Howard University, where later Cornell and botanical-history sources say he became a professor and chair of the English department. His writing is closely tied to the work of the American Negro Academy, a leading Black intellectual society of the period.

His best-known work is A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem (1899), and he also contributed The Penning of the Negro to the 1905 collection The Negro and the Elective Franchise. Across these works, he examined race, citizenship, and voting rights with an academic but urgent voice. He died in 1910.