Rosey E. Pool

Rosey E. Pool (7 May 1905, Amsterdam – 29 September 1971, London) was a Dutch translator, educator, and anthologist of African American poetry. Rosey Pool was born and raised in a secular Jewish family in Amsterdam. In the 1920s she participated in Dutch Popular Front youth movements, such as the socialist Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale (AJC) and the Social Democratic Students Club (SDSC). In 1927 she was one of the founders of the Socialistist Artists Circle (SKK). In August 1927, shortly after her engagement to the Berlin jurist and later Hamburg senator Gerhard Kramer (1904–1973), Pool moved to Berlin. There she studied English Literature at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (currently known as the Humboldt University). She wrote her dissertation on The Poetry of the American Negro, but was unable to finish this because of anti-Jewish measures by the Nazis. In 1935 Kramer and Pool divorced. From Berlin, Pool helped German Jews to flee to the Netherlands, by providing them addresses. In January 1939, shortly after the Kristallnacht, Pool returned to Amsterdam.

During the Second World War she taught at the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam (with Anne Frank amongst her pupils). Pool became involved in a German Jewish resistance group named Van Dien, which had formed around the Tehuis Oosteinde. In September 1943, this resistance group helped her to escape from the Nazi transit camp Westerbork. She hid in the town of Baarn, wrote resistance poetry and compiled a bundle of African American poetry.

In the late 1940s Pool moved to London. She became involved in the Black Arts Movement, both in Britain and the United States. She traveled to the United States as a Fulbright scholar and UNCF funding (1959-1960) and as a guest lecturer at a number of colleges in the Deep South. In the United States she contributed to the emancipation of African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement by comparing anti-Jewish measures of the Nazis with the segregation of the American South. Rosey Pool established correspondence with famous writers and poets, such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Naomi Madgett, Owen Dodson, Gordon Heath, and Robert Hayden. When Pool was a guest lecturer at Alabama A and M she organized two writers conferences, with Samuel Allen (Paul Vesey), Margaret Burroughs, Dudley Randall and Mari Evans. Ed Simpkins explained: "it was Rosey Pool's [book] Beyond the Blues that first brought us together (...).'

In 1966 Pool was a jury member at the World Festival of Black Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal. The jury awards prizes to the poet Robert Hayden and Nelson Mandela. In April 30, 1965 Pool became a follower of the Bahá'í Faith. She was visible promoting the religion.