Patterson, William L.

PATTERSON, WILLIAM L. (1891–1980). One of the most prominent African American Left leaders, William Lorenzo Patterson made his name as a legal defender of minority rights, Communist journalist, and teacher. Born in San Francisco, the son of a mother who had been born into slavery in Virginia and of a father from St. Vincent, West Indies, Patterson attended the University of California (suspended for a time for refusing participation in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) and went on to receive a law degree from Hastings College in 1919. After an attempt to emigrate to Liberia, he moved to New York as a practicing lawyer.

Patterson first became prominent as an African American defender of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s, and was arrested several times on picket lines. Soon a leader of the International Labor Defense (ILD), he abandoned his youthful conviction that the salvation of the African American people lay in returning to Africa and joined the Communist Party in 1927.

Returning to New York City after the Sacco-Vanzetti defense work in Boston had ended, Patterson plunged into the Harlem Renaissance. Paul Robeson and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois were among his closest associates. During this period he made the first of his many visits to the Soviet Union, where he attended the University of the Toiling People of the Far East until 1931.

Back in the United States during the 1930s, Patterson became Party organizer for Pittsburgh and Harlem, then returned to legal defense as his mainstay. As executive secretary of the ILD, he played a central role in the seventeen-year defense of the “Scottsboro Boys.” By 1938 he relocated to Chicago, becoming an associate editor of the Midwest Daily Record and a party organizer for the city’s heavily African American South Side. In 1940, he married Louise Thompson, a Left activist and close associate of Langston Hughes.

Patterson returned to national prominence at the end of the 1940s as national executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress. In 1951 he led a Paris delegation to the United Nations, while Paul Robeson led a delegation in New York, to charge the US government, under the 1948 United Nations resolution, with officially sanctioning genocidal treatment of African Americans. During this period, he also became a prominent advocate for the integration of a professional baseball and met with team owners and the commissioner of baseball to urge that step. In 1958, Patterson became editor of the Sunday Worker, and remained a prolific journalist and political leader until his death.

Horne, Gerald. Communist Front?: The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988.

Howard, Walter T. We Shall Be Free!: Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.

“Humanity’s Finest Son.” Daily World, 15 March 1980.

Patterson, William L. The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Patterson, William L. Works by or about. Internet Archive website.