Patterson, Louise Thompson

PATTERSON, LOUISE THOMPSON (1901-1999). As an educator, supporter of Black culture, early civil rights activist in Harlem, and member of the Communist Party, Louise Thompson created an indispensable bridge between Black artists and Popular Front cultural politics. Born in Chicago but raised in several predominantly white, often racist communities in the West, she settled with her family in Oakland, California, in 1919. Although she earned a degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1923, racism limited her career opportunities and she eventually made her way back to the Midwest, where she briefly initiated graduate work at the University of Chicago. Giving up school, as well as a lucrative position at a Black-owned Chicago firm, Thompson headed south to take a teaching job in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1925, and a year later accepted a faculty position at Hampton Institute in Virginia. Because she openly supported a student strike at Hampton in 1927, the administration pressured her to resign, after which she headed to New York to accept an Urban League fellowship to study at the New York School for Social Work.

Unimpressed with social-work paternalism as a means to improve the lives of poor Blacks, she discontinued her education in 1930 and turned to New York’s Congregational Educational Society (CES), a liberal organization interested in the problems of race relations and labor. Simultaneously, she became a prominent figure in Black cultural circles, serving as editorial secretary for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and offering her spacious apartment as a meeting place for Black artists and intellectuals. Her involvement in social problems and cultural politics, compounded by the Great Depression, the Scottsboro case, and the growing strength of the Communist Party in Harlem, radicalized Thompson. She and sculptor Augusta Savage formed a left-wing social club called the Vanguard, out of which developed a branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU). Soon thereafter Thompson attended classes at the Workers’ School, moving deeper into the Party’s inner circle.

As secretary of the Harlem chapter of FOSU, she became principal organizer of a group of Black artists invited to the Soviet Union in 1932 to make a film about Afro-American life. Although the project was abandoned, she returned to New York with a deeper appreciation of socialism and a greater affinity for Communist politics. In 1933 she left CES and served as assistant national secretary of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, through which she was officially asked to join the Communist Party. A year later she accepted a full-time position in the International Workers Order (IWO) and continued to organize cultural and political events on behalf of the Party in Harlem and elsewhere (including Alabama, where in 1934 she spent a night in a Birmingham jail). As Black artists joined the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s, Thompson was a critical liaison linking Black popular culture and Harlem’s literati with Communist Popular Front politics. In 1938, for example, she and Langston Hughes organized the IWO-sponsored “Harlem Suitcase Theatre,” which performed a number of works by Black playwrights.

In 1940, Louise Thompson married longtime friend and veteran Party leader William L. Patterson—who more than a decade earlier had suggested she read Marx and look seriously at events in the Soviet Union. Soon afterward she joined “Pat” in Chicago and continued her work nationally and locally. Among other things, she served as national recording secretary of the IWO and helped establish a Black community center on Chicago’s South Side.

In 1951, Thompson became instrumental in the founding of the short-lived Sojourners for Truth and Justice. Co-founded with Beulah Richardson, Charlotta Bass, Lorraine Hansberry and others, the Sojourners called for an end to police violence against Black Americans and an end to the Korean war. The Sojourners also helped promote the CRC’s We Charge Genocide petition. The Sojourners sent out a call to Black women to travel to Washington, DC to confront President Truman with their demands for peace and an end to violence against Black Americans. In September 1951, more than 100 women converged in Washington, but Truman would not meet with the women, though they did meet with others in the Justice Department. The Sojourners would last only until 1952 as Cold War harassment intensified, and few people wanted to be associated with the group.

The Pattersons continued their political work despite growing anticommunism. Thompson would contribute to the radical publication Freedomways and support the Cuban revolution. She helped Herbert Aptheker create the American Institute of Marxist Studies, and along with her husband supported Black Panther Party members in their legal struggles. Thompson was an active and eager supporter of Angela Davis’s defense in 1970, traveling around the world to raise funds. Thompson settled into a quieter life as she aged. She died at ninety-eight years old in 1999.

Gilyard, Keith. Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

McDuffie, Erick. Sojourning for Truth and Justice: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Patterson, Louise. Interview by Ruth Prago, 16 November 1981 (transcribed). Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library, New York University. http://digitaltamiment.hosting.nyu.edu/s/cpoh/item/4035

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

Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, 1909-1999. Finding Aid. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Emory University. https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/patterson869/?keywords=patterson