page_title: Louise Thompson Patterson
section_title: Trans-national activism
hierarchical_section_title: Louise Thompson Patterson / Trans-national activism
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context_page_description: Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was an American social activist and college professor. Thompson was acquainted with many of the leading literary figures during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, spending most of her life involved in civil rights. Thompson Patterson is also known as one of the first black women to be enrolled into the University of California at Berkeley.
context_section_description: Though Thompson organized a number of protests and opened one of the premiere Harlem salons, she became best known for her close friendship with the author Langston Hughes. Both admired the Soviet system of government.Thompson founded a Harlem chapter of the Friends of the Soviet Union in, 1932. The American Communist Party selected Thompson to organize a group of twenty-two Harlem writers, artists, and intellectuals to create a film about discrimination in the United States for a Soviet film company. Many important individuals of the Harlem Renaissance were a part of this group such as the author Dorthy West, and Langston Hughes. After the project fell through due to lack of funding, and pressures from U.S. business officials to pull away from future diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Thompson and Hughes returned to the United States to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which presented plays written by Hughes and other black writers and featured all-black casts. In 1932 Thompson led a group of African American actors who traveled together to visit the Soviet Union.
caption: University of California, Berkeley
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