Contributions and Distinctions
Louise Alone Thompson (Patterson) is a notable African American UC Berkeley alumna who engaged in a lifelong battle for social justice. Louise Thompson Patterson participated in struggles for human rights, from the defense of the Scottsboro Boys case to freeing Angela Davis. She joined the Communist Party, following her friend, poet Langston Hughes, to New York in 1928, where she worked among artists, writers, and intellectuals in the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston employed her as a typist. At the invitation of the Soviet Union, she traveled with Hughes and a group of young Black intellectuals associated with the cultural life of Harlem to Russia in 1932. The Russians’ promise to make a film about race in America, to be called “Black and White,” didn’t pan out. Thompson returned home, and in 1937, she joined Hughes, Paul Robeson, and other American Communists to combat Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. At the age of ninety, Patterson returned to the Berkeley campus to attend the Seventeenth Annual Black Graduation, where she received the Fannie Lou Hamer Award. The Louise Thompson Patterson award is given annually to recognize student contributions to Black excellence at UC Berkeley.
Biographical Sketch
Patterson (1901-1999), whose maiden name was Thompson, graduated from Oakland High School at fifteen and was admitted to UC Berkeley. Patterson lived with her mother in a house on Bancroft Way. She enrolled in the College of Commerce and completed a major in economics with honors and a minor in Spanish. Her Black classmates included Vivian Osborne Marsh and Ida Jackson, also pictured on this mural. In March of her senior year, she attended a lecture by W.E.B. DuBois, the most important Black intellectual of her time, on “The Economic Condition of the Negro in the United States,” which she considered a turning point in opening her eyes to racism.
In 1927, she began teaching business courses at Hampton Institute, an African-American college in Virginia, where she met the writer Langston Hughes. She married lawyer William Patterson, a Communist, and together they joined and led civil rights movements. Their daughter, Dr. Mary Louise Patterson (UC Berkeley MS in Public Health 2019) co-edited a book about her parents' correspondence with Langston Hughes: Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (UC Press, 2016).