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Introduction William L. Patterson was determined. It was December 17, 1951, and the bespectacled, balding, and somewhat burly black lawyer—and Communist—was in Paris on a historic mission. Following in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass, who repeatedly had taken the plight of the enslaved African to an international audience—particularly to London, Washington ’s prime antagonist and the citadel of abolitionism—Patterson was in Paris making a similar appeal, but this time to all nations organized within the United Nations: he was targeting his country’s hateful Jim Crow system. Snow was falling softly, and the temperature was frigid, so he buttoned his coat as he strode hurriedly a few blocks to the Palais de Chaillot, stopping briefly for fortification at a restaurant on the East Bank of the Seine, where he had often eaten over the years. He had coordinated this campaign with Jacques Duclos of the French Communist party, who remembered Patterson’s yeoman service in Western Europe in the anti-Nazi underground in the 1930s. With Duclos’s assistance, he secured a hotel room near L’Opéra and conveniently near the American Express office. At the eatery he espied and embraced Clarina Michelson, whom he had known in Boston in 1927, where he had arrived from his home in Manhattan in a vain attempt to halt the slated executions of the renowned political prisoners—and anarchists—Sacco and Vanzetti. They chatted briefly about his mission, which involved seeking global support for an indictment of U.S. authorities for “genocide ” against African Americans. His relationship with her had deepened further when Patterson became the chief organizer to save the lives of the Scottsboro Nine—young black men falsely accused, then convicted of the rape of two white women and scheduled to be executed. There too a massive global crusade had stayed the hand of the executioners, providing the powerful lesson that global solidarity was the key to compelling a retreat of the U.S. authorities. Finally he arrived at his destination, and it was there that an epochal divide was solidified in black America. At the Palais de Chaillot he encountered Channing Tobias, a fellow U.S. Negro who had been associated with the premier civil-rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Tobias was mightily displeased with Patterson’s bold demarche. As Patterson recalled him, Tobias was a “handsome man more than six feet tall and 2 introduction with a beautiful head of grey hair and a light complexion.” The irritated leader beckoned to Patterson and “without offering his hand or even so much as a howdo -you-do,” Tobias said beseechingly, “‘Why did you do this thing?’” As they engaged in a bitter philippic, they attracted the attention of a photographer who captured this historic moment when, symbolically, centrist and leftist Negroes divided and departed on separate paths.1 For as Tobias’s presence in Paris well demonstrated, Washington was in the process of an agonized retreat from the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow, which would lead to the promotion to the highest levels of those like himself—but, like a seesaw, the price paid for this emolument was a fierce attack upon and imprisonment of those like Patterson, who had refused to accept the bargain offered (civilrights concessions in return for backing away from militant internationalism). The decline of this militant left also involved a marginalizing of progressive trade unions,2 which left an overwhelmingly working-class black community barely protected in an increasingly globalized economy, as middle-class elements like Tobias rose on the class ladder, even to the stratospheric climes of the official U.S. delegation in Paris. But in December 1951, this outcome was not foreseen by most. Surely, it was not simple to predict that Patterson himself—theretofore viewed widely as a preeminent leader despite his Communist affiliation—would be subjected to a concerted campaign of ostracism that, by the time of his death in 1980, left a deep imprint on his public image. A few months before his fateful rendezvous with Tobias in Paris, his close friend and comrade Paul Robeson had announced what seemed obvious when he proclaimed, “I think that most of the people in the United States know the name of William Patterson.”3 Upping the ante, the Baltimore Afro-American referred to Patterson as “internationally famed.”4 The Black Dispatch of Oklahoma City concurred, adding that “like Robeson, he represents the unqualified thinking of black men, without reservations...

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