Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by Erik McDuffie (review)

An excellent scholarly study of black activists/feminists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, McDuffie tracks these women’s lives and causes, their involvement with the U.S. Communist Party, and their involvement with international movements. Most rewarding is McDuffie’s discussion of the intriguing politics and life of Louis Thompson Patterson, most often known as the wife for six months to gay Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman, friend to Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, secretary to Charlotte Osgood, and wife of American Communist Party leader William Patterson. McDuffie, though, gives a fuller and more complex picture of Patterson, whose radical activism has not been given its due until now.