Patterson, Louise Thompson, 1901-1999

Louise Alone Thompson Patterson, born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 9, 1901, the only child of William Toles and Lula P. Brown. After the divorce of her parents when she was four, Patterson spent her childhood in numerous western cities. She graduated cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley in 1923 with a degree in economics. She worked various jobs and taught for two years before going to New York City to study at the New York School of Social Work (now part of Columbia University). After completing her yearlong study, she began working as a typist for a number of Harlem Renaissance writers and met poet Langston Hughes, starting a friendship that would last until Hughes' death in 1967. She worked on several projects with Hughes and his artistic collaborator Zora Neale Hurston including Mule Bone, the play that eventually caused the disintegration of the Hurston-Hughes partnership. Patterson also typed the manuscript for The Blacker the Berry, a novel by Wallace Thurman, to whom she was married for a short time in 1928-1929.

Louise's apartment in New York, which she shared with Sue Bailey, was a center of activity during the Harlem Renaissance, the Black cultural and artistic movement in the 1920's and 1930's. She became involved in several projects during this time, including the controversial and unrealized Soviet film project "Black and White," which looked at Black life in the United States.

Louise married prominent attorney William L. Patterson in 1940. A member of the American Communist Party, Patterson organized the Civil Rights Congress. He also worked with actor/singer Paul Robeson. Together Patterson and Robeson delivered the petition "We Charge Genocide" before the United Nations, charging the United States Government with genocide against African peoples. Louise was herself an organizer; she led a march in Washington, D.C. for the "Scottsboro Boys" in the 1930s and headed the Angela Davis Defense Fund in the 1970s. During her adulthood, Louise served with the International Workers Order, the Council of African Affairs, and the National Alliance. Louise Thompson Patterson died in New York City on August 27, 1999.