Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice by Keith Gilyard (review)

Louise Thompson Patterson led a remarkable life that took her into working and political relationships with some of the most significant African Americans of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the entirety of the century (1901–99). Her principal years as an activist were as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), where she played a crucial role in the party’s involvement in civil rights and struggles on behalf of Black people. Until publication of this biography, her presence has largely been invisible to historians of African American movements for equality. Keith Gilyard’s account therefore adds an important chapter to this history.

Born in Chicago, Louise traversed the country with her mother, who divorced shortly after Louise was born. Louise’s mother was white but her father was African American. Louise’s light skin colour created complications for her throughout her life, but her identity clearly was with African Americans, a people of many tones from light to black. Although her mother sought employment in many parts of the American West, the family eventually settled in California where Louise finished her high school and went on to study at University of California, Berkeley. Her degree in business and accounting gave her the skills to find employment as a teacher in the South, eventually landing a position at Hampton Institute, the all-Black university in Virginia.

This biographical background is crucial to understanding her gradual radicalisation during the 1920s, as her time at Hampton coincided with student protests there against repressive policies by the main white administrator, but also her first contact with W. E. B. DuBois, who was a guest speaker at Hampton. DuBois was the editor of the Crisis in Harlem at this time and was at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance and political activism with the NAACP. Louise eventually left Hampton for New York, working for Black writer Zora Neale Hurston and establishing a wide network that connected her to Black writers, including poet Langston Hughes, who became a lifelong friend.

Louise’s life changed dramatically, however, when she joined Hughes and other left-wing writers and actors in a film project that took her to the Soviet Union in 1932. On her return to the USA she became involved in the CPUSA’s crusade to free the Scottsboro Nine, a group of young Black men accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama. Louise was pivotal in working with one of these women, Ruby Bates, who admitted to lying about the incident to escape being prosecuted for vagrancy.

The range of causes Louise became involved in encompassed some of the most important events of American left-wing history, from the Great Depression through the 1970s. She accompanied Hughes and others to Spain at the time of the civil war there and became heavily involved in the Popular Front against fascism on her return to the USA. As a party functionary, she played a pivotal role in the CP’s activism connected to prominent African Americans, including the singer and actor Paul Robeson. Although she wrote regular articles that were published by the party, her role was not one of developing party policy or theory. After an earlier failed marriage, she married William Patterson, an African American leader in the CPUSA and an attorney who defended Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists falsely accused of murder. Louise was not in the main party leadership, but led party organisations that were involved in solidarity with Africa and advocating world peace (the Council on African Affairs), advocacy for the rights of women within the context of African Americans, and campaigns against McCarthyism and attacks on the Left during the 1950s.

By 1970, she was executive secretary of the New York Committee to free Angela Davis, a CP member falsely accused of supplying Black activist Jonathon Jackson with a gun in a shootout at Marin County Courthouse, California. Louise...