Struggling for Justice
Book Review

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/196/review-louise-thompson-patterson/
Date Written:  2018-09-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23410

Mainly postive review Keith Gilyard’s biography of organizer, educator, cultural worker and Black Left feminist Louise Thompson Patterson.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Louise Thompson Patterson:
A Life of Struggle for Justice
By Keith Gilyard
Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 282 pages + index, $26.95 paperback.

Taking advantage of the fact that Thompson Patterson's life literally spanned the 20th century from 1901 to 1999, Gilyard explores Thompson Patterson’s involvement in momentous events. These include the 1927 Mississippi River flood ("that era's Hurricane Katrina"); the 1927 Hampton student strike; the Harlem Renaissance; the anti-lynching Scottsboro campaign; the Spanish Civil War; the Popular Front; the Chicago Renaissance; the founding of the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Council on African Affairs; African-American solidarity with the Soviet Union, Cuba and the People’s Republic of China; the Black Power movement; and, at age 69, the campaign to free Angela Davis.

In so doing Gilyard shows how Thompson Patterson's career, and that of other Black women activists, impacted and reinterpreted the meanings and outcomes of African-American, workers’ and women’s struggles.