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Louise T. Patterson; Last Survivor of Harlem Renaissance

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times
Sunday 19 September 1999

Louise Thompson Patterson, a social activist who was the last remaining survivor of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance and a longtime associate of poet and playwright Langston Hughes, died Aug. 27 in New York. She was 97.

A Chicago native who was reared in the West, Patterson was one of the first black graduates of UC Berkeley, earning a degree in business administration in 1923. She later joined the faculty of Virginia's Hampton Institute, a black college with a predominantly white teaching staff and admin- istration that boasted as its star pupil Booker T. Washington, who would later found Tuskegee Institute.

In 1927, Patterson supported a strike against Hampton's paternalistic policies, which included a lighted cinema to prevent necking and Sunday serenades of white visitors with plantation songs.

Described by scholar Faith Berry as "too proud of her race not to be a part of it," Patterson moved to New York the next year, drawn to the intellectual and creative ferment of the 1920s and 1930s that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem in the '20s was called the capital of the black world, the crossroads for an explosion of cultural awareness among American blacks. The movement produced great achievements in the arts, from the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to the writing of Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman and Hughes, who earned belated recognition as the poet laureate of that golden era.

Patterson was not an artist--she came to New York on an Urban League fellowship to study social work--but she became a central figure in the movement. Described as beautiful and intelligent in historical accounts of the era, she quickly made her mark on the Harlem scene. She married Thurman, the writer and leading bohemian intellectual, soon after her arrival (and separated from him about six months later). Later, she formed a salon called Vanguard that attracted Harlem artists with concerts, dances and discussions of Marxist theory.

A lifelong friendship with Hughes began when Patterson was hired as his stenographer on a play called "Mule Bone," which he co-wrote with Hurston, another leading figure of the Harlem cultural movement. Hughes and Hurston had hoped that the folk comedy, written in rural black dialect, would alter the course of black theater in 1931 when it was scheduled for production.

But "Mule Bone" became a bone of contention between its authors, whose partnership collapsed because of Hurston's jealousy of Patterson. The play was never finished, though Hurston later tried to peddle it as solely her own.

The Hughes-Hurston collaboration "represented the aspirations of the Harlem Renaissance," wrote historian Steven Watson, and its breakup "reflect[ed] the movement's end."

Patterson and Hughes denied that their relationship was romantic. "It was all a figment of [Hurston's] imagination," Patterson said in a Newsday interview several years ago. Yet she played a pivotal role in Hughes' life.

Like Hughes, Patterson admired the Soviet Union as a model for future societies, one that held the promise of racial equality. In 1932, she led a group of 22 black writers, artists and intellectuals-- including Hughes and poet Dorothy West--to the Soviet Union. They were to act in a film for a Moscow company about discrim- ination against blacks in the United States.

The American blacks were treated like heroes, welcomed by a brass band, fed caviar for breakfast, and pushed to the front of bus and theater lines. "For all of us who experienced discrim- ination based on color in our own land," Patterson once wrote in an essay about the trip, "it was strange to find our color a badge of honor, our key to the city, so to speak."

The film was never made, which led to international headlines and caused a rift in the group, part of which dubbed Patterson "Madame Moscow" for being too trusting of the Soviets. The cancellation of the project made international headlines.

But it inspired Hughes on his return to the United States to open a "people's theater" for the working class. He and Patterson went on to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which started with the Hughes play "Don't You Want to Be Free?" in 1938. Its pro- ductions featured unpaid community actors such as Robert Earl Jones, (later to become the father of actor James Earl Jones), whose career was launched at the Suitcase Theater. The elder Jones had a role in "Mule Bone" when it finally reached the stage --the Barrymore Theater on Broadway--in 1991.

Patterson and Hughes also were in Spain together to support the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War. Hughes later dedicated "Shakespeare in Harlem," a 1942 collection of poems, to Patterson. He died in 1967.

After returning from the Soviet Union, Patterson organized a march in Washington and other public forums to support the so- called Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths who had been wrongly accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Ala. Many years later, in the early 1970s, she helped organize Angela Davis' defense fund.

Patterson was close to Paul Robeson, the singer and actor who was persecuted for his political beliefs during the McCarthy era. After a Robeson concert in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1949 ended in a riot provoked by anti-Robeson demonstrators, she organized a national tour of black communities for the singer to show that he would not be silenced.

"She was an organizer," said Berry, who knew Patterson and wrote about her in a biography of Langston Hughes published in 1983. "She was a leader, an organizer, a humane person who felt deeply about these causes and never wavered in her humane outlook."

After her divorce from Thurman, Patterson in 1940 married William Patterson, a prominent member of the American Communist Party who organized the Civil Rights Congress and was jailed for contempt of Congress by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for refusing to identify the group's supporters. He died in 1980.

Patterson is survived by a daughter, two granddaughters and a great-grandson.

A private memorial service will be held today in New York, and a West Coast memorial is planned in Oakland in mid-October.