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11 The CP’s “FBI Faction” Rises Forced away from the burgeoning civil-rights movement, seeking to avoid another incarceration, raising a young daughter, and trying to stay abreast of a rapidly changing global scene, the compelled death of the CRC did not necessarily lighten William Patterson’s burden as he entered a brave new world in 1956. By April 1956, the FBI found that he and his family were residing in Brooklyn at 1268 President Street and that he was “self-employed as [a] Civil Rights Consultant.”1 Fortunately, his spouse, whose public life was not as well-defined as his, was able to find work, allowing the clan to persevere.2 Still, the left was not wholly bereft; as the FBI reported, the Pattersons’ 1956 income was a considerable $7966.30, with a portion of this sum coming from the recently organized hospital workers union in New York, organized with significant aid from the CP—a union in which Louise Patterson toiled, in her words, as a “technical worker.”3 Patterson received a monthly subsidy of $350 from the CP and was about to receive a pension from Social Security.4 Patterson was fortunate, since by mid-1958, some CP cadre—according to the FBI—had “worked for 4, 5, 6 weeks without any pay.”5 “Almost daily the burdens” of the party’s organ “grow larger,” The Worker reported agonizingly in mid-1958.6 “Every week,” said this paper, then under Patterson’s leadership, “must see from $2,500 to $3,000 come in or The Worker is in jeopardy. We must either borrow or fail to pay wages.” The “press run” then was eighteen thousand, a useful indicator of membership, and in “January the run was 6,000 less than that.”7 In April 1958, admitted FBI “surveillance” of CP headquarters at 23 West Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, captured Patterson lamenting the “poor health” of this periodical . Things were “extremely critical,” he remarked. “I have a lot of leg work,” he complained, “and don’t even have a secretary.”8 Predictably, the paper’s crack sportswriter, Lester Rodney, who played a significant role in the push to desegregate major-league baseball, was among those forced to flee: “I am sorry it had to come to this,” he told Patterson with sadness, but “I am forced to take steps to protect my family.”9 158 chapter eleven That was not all. The FBI captured Patterson’s telephone conversation with Ben Davis, his fellow party leader, where the former CRC official complained that a “racketeer union” tied up distribution of the party newspaper. “I’m going down to the lawyers,” he responded. “I’m trying to get it out now. It may come off the press at 2:45 this morning, but the racketeers wouldn’t handle it and they are trying to force me to sign a contract”—besides which, the IRS was again breathing down his neck.10 “Most dealers have been so terrorized by the FBI hooligans,” Patterson complained in September 1959, “they fear to carry our weekly.”11 Government harassment and surveillance further hampered his effectiveness. When Ferdinand Smith in Jamaica sought to contact Patterson, he cautioned, “maybe you can find a reliable ‘cover,’ non-political, where I can write you,”12 which was neither simple nor easy. In sum, Patterson had his hands full as a party official at this juncture. There was mulling over the consequences of the Stalin devaluation in Moscow, the import of the Bandung gathering of mostly Asian and African nations, the fierce confrontation over desegregation in Little Rock, battles to halt the isolation of iconic figures like Robeson and Du Bois, and lingering CRC matters, along with marches on Washington and congressional inquisitions in the same city. All of these matters—each weighty in themselves—were complicated tremendously by the then-unknown presence of a powerful FBI faction within the highest ranks of the party, led by the wily Morris Childs, who was quite effective in gumming up potentially far-reaching proposals and stoking internal conflict. Looming above all else was the internecine conflict wracking the CP, fueled by Childs and providing a plethora of headlines for the U.S. press, which in turn alienated actual and potential members. At the sixteenth convention of the CP in February 1957, there were seventy correspondents from newspapers, television, and radio, including journalists from Italy, Poland, and the Soviet Union, not to mention—as the CP proudly (and ironically) noted...

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