Thompson, Louise (1901–1999)

views updated

Thompson, Louise (1901–1999)

African-American educator, labor organizer, and social reformer. Name variations: Louise Patterson. Born Louise Alone Thompson on September 9, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois; died on August 27, 1999, in New York City; graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, 1923; married Wallace Thurman (a novelist and playwright), in August 1928 (separated 1929, died 1934); married William Patterson (a lawyer), in 1940 (died 1980); children: (second marriage) one daughter, Mary Louise Patterson (b. 1943).

A leading figure in the civil-rights and social-reform movements of the 1930s and 1940s, Louise Thompson was also associated with New York's Harlem Renaissance, mainly through her marriage to novelist and playwright Wallace Thurman, her first husband, and her long-time association with poet Langston Hughes, who dedicated his 1942 collection of poems, Shakespeare in Harlem, to her.

Thompson was born in 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, but spent her early years in a succession of small, predominately white, towns across the Pacific Northwest, where her restless stepfather worked as a chef and her mother picked up jobs as a domestic. She and her mother, both light-skinned, frequently passed for white or Mexican as they moved from town to town, which helped overcome the racial alienation and isolation of their itinerant lives.

While attending the University of California at Berkeley, Thompson continued to alter her ethnic identity, finding most employment opportunities closed to black applicants. At Berkeley, however, she attended a lecture on racism by sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, whose uplifting message so motivated her that she became determined to move East and become part of the black literary renaissance he helped to inspire. It would be several years, however, before she would realize her goal.

After graduating in 1923 with a degree in business administration, Thompson spent a year teaching at a black college in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, then accepted a position at Hampton Institute in Virginia, a college with a black student body but a predominately white administration and faculty. Strongly opposing the subtly racist and paternalistic policies of the school, Thompson supported a student strike at Hampton before leaving for New York in 1928, to study at the New School for Social Research under a scholarship from the Urban League.

Thompson became part of the lively social circle of the Harlem Renaissance through her friendship with the painter Aaron Douglas and his wife Alta Douglas . Through them, she met writer Wallace Thurman, who hired her as a typist. Romance ensued and Thompson married Thurman in August 1928, overlooking his homosexuality and his chronic alcoholism and depression. They separated six months later, although the marriage was not terminated until Thurman's death in 1934. Meanwhile, Thompson became a secretary to Langston Hughes, whom she had first met when he gave a poetry reading at Hampton Institute. Having much in common, the two became close friends and often socialized together, although, contrary to rumors at the time, they were never romantically involved.

In 1932, after helping to form a Harlem branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union, Thompson was recruited by James W. Ford, the leading black American Communist of the day, to gather a group of black artists, writers, and intellectuals to travel to Moscow to make a Soviet-sponsored movie entitled "Black and White," about white supremacy in America. With much difficulty, Thompson assembled 22 participants for the project, including her friend Hughes, whom she recruited to help write the English dialogue for the screenplay. The project was canceled, however, shortly after the arrival of the group on Soviet soil. Ostensibly, the cancellation was blamed on an inefficient Soviet film company, although the true reason may have been the Soviet fear of negative American reaction. Despite the project's demise, Thompson was overwhelmed by the preferential treatment she received in the USSR. "For all of us who experienced discrimination based on color in our own land, it was strange to find our color a badge of honor, our key to the city, so to speak," she wrote in an article for Freedomways titled "With Langston Hughes in the USSR" (1968). Some in the group, however, saw Thompson as too trusting of her Russian hosts and took to calling her Madam Moscow.

Returning to the United States, Thompson became more politically radical than ever, organizing a march on Washington, D.C., to protest the Scottsboro case, which involved nine black youths who were wrongly accused of raping two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price , in a railroad car, and were sentenced to death. She later traveled to Spain to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the 1930s, Thompson also ran a left-wing salon (Vanguard) from her Harlem apartment.

Through her association with the International Workers Order (IWO), a fraternal society affiliated with the Communist Party, Thompson arranged a series of lectures for Hughes entitled "A Negro Poet Looks at a Troubled World." She also persuaded the IWO to publish a collection of his radical poems, A New Song. In 1938, she and Hughes founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which was housed on the second floor of the IWO community center at West 125th Street. Among the agit-prop plays produced there was Hughes' musical play Don't You Want to Be Free?

In 1940, Thompson married William Patterson, a lawyer and the executive secretary of the International Labor Defense, which had defended the Scottsboro Nine. She moved with him to Chicago, where she continued to work for social causes and gave birth to a daughter Mary Louise in 1943. The couple eventually returned to New York, where Patterson died in 1980. Thompson died in a Manhattan nursing home in 1999, at age 97.