In 1951, after the United Nations ratified its Gencide Convention, The Civil Rights Congress (see below) submitted a petition to the U.N., titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government against the Negro People.” The petition, signed by over 100 activists and intellectuals, documents hundreds of cases of the murder or unnecessary death of Black people in the United States, whether through lynching or systemic causes, all that unite them are either the indifference or support of the U.S. government. Civil Rights Congress Secretary William Patterson edited the document and delivered it to a U.N. in Paris, while Paul Robeson delivered it to the U.N. headquarters in New York, as his passport had been seized. (Source)

Longtime activist and organizer, Eric Mann hosts weekly radio show Voices from the Frontlines on Pacifica KPFK 90.7FM (Tuesdays at 3PM PST) where he conducts interviews with frontline organizers from across the globe. In this episode, Mary Louise discusses and reads from her book Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond and talks about her parents and their work. (Source)

Watch Jeffrey Stewart and Mary Louise Patterson talk about the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and two of its most essential writers, Alain Locke and Langston Hughes. (Source)

This book, which came together through the initiative of Mary Louise Patterson and Evelyn Louise Crawford, celebrates the life and work of Langston Hughes through letters of correspondence between Hughes and four radical and revolutionary friends: Matt N. Crawford, Evelyn "Nebby" Graves Crawford, and William L. Patterson and Louise Thompson Patterson. This book reveals both the political and very personal threads between the friendship and love of Black radical thinkers who were navigating a dynamic moment in U.S. movement history.

William Lorenzo Patterson (1891-1980) was a Marxist lawyer, activist, and writer. He is best known for his leadership in the Communist Party USA, where he served as a national leader, and in the International Labor Defense (ILD) and its succeeding organization, the Congress of Civil Rights. He also led the legal campaign to free the Scottsboro Nine (see below) and two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 1951, William Patterson traveled to Paris to deliver the historic “We Charge Genocide” petition to a meeting of U.N. members. (Source)

Louise Alone Thompson Patterson (1901-1999) was a prominent Marxist activist. She taught at a number of universities before moving to New York, where she became closely connected to literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, who she became very personally close with. In 1932, she founded the Harlem chapter of the Friends of the Soviet Union and was tasked by the CPUSA to film a movie in the USSR about the Black experience in the U.S. Maintaining a long life of activism, she also prominently led the Free Angela Davis Committee in New York in the 1960s. (Source)

As a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Frances M. Beal (1940- ) co-founded the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of SNCC, which later evolved into the Third World Women’s Alliance. In 1969, Beal authored the influential text, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” which discusses the interlocking oppressions of capitalism and racism, misogyny, and white supremacy.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a poet, playwright, activist, and notable figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote profoundly on the experience of being Black in America and his literary body of work has been lauded as historically influential. However, few people know about his association and support for the communist struggle in the United States and the international solidarity work he undertook. In 1931 he traveled to the South to condemn the case against the Scottsboro Boys (see below), he traveled to the Soviet Union and Haiti on a number of solidarity trips, and reported on the Spanish Civil War.

James and Esther Jackson were two leading organizers with the Communist Party USA and party-led organizations the National Negro Congress (NNC) and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). Part of a large wave of anti-racist leaders coming out of the communist tradition, James and Esther Jackson had significant influence in bringing anti-racist organizing to trade unionism of the 1930s. (Source)

As active members of the Communist Party USA, Grace and Max Granich ran a summer camp called Higley Hill in Wilmington, Vermont, for children of other CPUSA members, who were facing severe persecution during the McCarthy Period (see below). The camp was meant to bring together children whose parents had been red-baited or jailed for being communist and a place that offered recluse from state surveillance. (Source)

Pete Seeger (1919-2014) is a renowned American folk musician and activist. In 1945, he founded People’s Song, a musicians union that worked to disseminate liberation music to labor and other progressive organizations around the country. Seeger was a member of the Communist Party USA from 1942 to 1950 and faced repression and government surveillance because of it. Seeger took a uniquely defiant stance when brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), stating that the government had no right to question him on his political beliefs. (Source)

Once the fundraiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and a close aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Jack O’Dell (1923-2019) was both a leader in the early Civil Rights Movement as well as a former member of the Communist Party USA. After President John F. Kennedy pressured King to ask O’Dell to leave the SCLC, he responded warning Civil Rights leadership about the risks of capitulating to anti-communist hysteria. He later went on to be an associate editor of the journal Freedomways and served on the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. (Source)

Nathaniel “Nat” Turner (c. 1800-1831) was born into slavery in Southhampton County, Virginia, and led one of the largest slave uprisings in American history. Taught to read by one of the sons of a former slave owner, Nat Turner studied Christianity and saw clearly the unnatural and cruel nature of slavery as an institution. Following the uprising, he was pursued and executed by state militia in a matter of weeks but Nat Turner’s uprising displayed the true extent to which enslaved peoples were willing to resist the horrendous nature of their conditions. (Source)

Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-1913) was a radical abolitionist and famously the conductor of the Underground Railroad that allowed hundreds of enslaved people to reach freedom in the Civil War era. In the perilous organizing of the Underground Railroad and her time as a spy in Confederate territory, Tubman was militant and disciplined in her dedication to freedom and liberation for all people. In later years, she would continue to struggle for equal rights of women and maintained a persistent revolutionary optimism until her death. (Source)

Dred and Harriet Scott (c. 1799-1858) unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their children in one of the most infamous legal cases of the pre-Civil War era. The Supreme Court ruled that that neither he nor any other person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States and that his residency in Illinois and Wisconsin, both states in which slavery was illegal, did not grant them emancipation. It is thought that the ruling of this case was one of the catalyzing events adding to the mounting pressure to abolish slavery in the U.S.

Ollie Harrington (1912-1995) was a radical cartoonist who used his most famous character, “Bootsie,” to document the reality of American racism in the early 20th century. Harrington’s work as a correspondent during the Second World War forced him to incorporate the Black liberation struggles of the time into his work, which had already reached national acclaim. He eventually came under the watchful eye of the FBI and McCarthyist persecution of the 1950s, which forced him to leave the U.S. and take up residence in Paris, where he met other Black American exiles, like James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

Reverend Lucius Walker (1930-2011) was a staunch anti-imperialist and pillar of the Cuba solidarity movement, founding the organization Pastors for Peace (see below). A pastor with the Salvation Baptist Church, Reverend Walker was heavily involved in the campaign to free the Cuban Five and made frequent trips to the island, bringing necessary supplies and goods to the Cuban people. Across from the U.S. embassy in Havana, a plaque is dedicated to him and his work at the José Martí Anti-Imperialist Tribune. (Source)

The International Workers Order (IWO) was established after a split in the Workmen’s Circle organization and provided low-cost sick, disability and death benefits to its members. The IWO had close associations to the Communist Party USA and supported foreign-language newspapers, cultural and educational activities. (Source)

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) arose from three other organizations: the International Labor Defense (ILD), the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. Led by William L. Patterson, CRC focused on mass movements and education through the legal defense and freedom campaigns. Some of its more noteworthy cases include the cases of Willie McGee, the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six, Rosa Lee Graham, and the role it played in publicizing the lynching of Emmett Till. CRC also lead the We Charge Genocide campaign (see above) which connected U.S. racism to the United States foreign policy of the time and brought these charges to an international audience. (Source)

The New Communist Movement emerged in the 1960s and was heavily influenced by the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the following socio-political project of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, along with national liberation projects that had been organized in Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and other countries. The many organizations that constituted the NCM largely came about as an attempt to revitalize a progressive liberation movement in the U.S. after the retreat of the Communist Party under McCarthyism and as an attempt to reignite a study-practice of Marxism Leninism. (Source)

The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) came out of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Some of the leaders who developed this organization include Frances M. Beal, Mae Jackson, and Gwendolyn Patton. The TWWA centered their work around highlighting the intersectional nature of capitalist, racist, and sexist oppression faced by women of color, particularly Black women, and internationalist solidarity with movements abroad. They published essential texts such as the pamphlet “Black Women’s Manifesto” and the newspaper Triple Jeopardy. (Source)

The Communist Party USA was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution in 1917. The CPUSA reached its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, yet suffered severe decline and isolation due to the anti-communist persecution of the McCarthy Period (see below). At its height, the CPUSA had influence in many different struggles across the nation and distinguished itself from other radical groups and parties by putting antiracism at the forefront of its national organizing. A number of noteworthy organizers and celebrities were once members or associated with the Communist Party, including Louise Thompson, Claudia Jones, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and others. (Source)

As part of an initiative of the 1927 Communist International, the International Association of Friends of the Soviet Union was established as the central authority for a number of Soviet Friendship Societies that had formed around the world. Louise Thompson helped to found the Harlem Branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union USA. As part of her work, she was tasked with traveling to the USSR with a delegation of other Black actors, writiers, and artists to create a documentary film on the treatment of Black people in the U.S., particularly in the South, related to some of the deadly labor organizing happening there. The film was never completed but cultural and solidarity exchange between the USSR and communities in the U.S. was essential to the communist movement in the U.S.

The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) was established in 1967 by Reverend Lucius Walker (see above) which has initiated, advised, and given support to national and international community-based projects. The anti-war project Pastors for Peace came about after Reverend Walker survived a first-hand terrorist attack by the Nicaraguan Contra forces. Since 1992, IFCO/Pastors for Peace have organized friendship caravans, brigades, and delegations to Cuba to foster cultural exchange and to deliver necessary goods as a counter to the U.S. economic blockade against the island. (Source)

In this episode, Mary Louise discusses the origins of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, also known as ELAM, enrolling working-class medical students from across the globe every year, including from the U.S. Tuition, accommodation, and board are free for all students, with the only requirement being that once students return to their home countries, they must serve to meet the needs of poor or low-income communities. (Source)

cynicism largely derives from the assumption that all human actions are actually motivated by selfish ideals of wealth and power rather than principles of equality, freedom, etc. Cynicism can often manifest in the sentiment that human beings are naturally selfish or individualistic, which conforms with a more liberal analysis of history rather than a materialist one.

McCarthyism characterizes the entire state-led apparatus of the anti-communist persecution campaign of the early-1950s in the United States. Termed after Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who held trials and hearings in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), McCarthist sentiment became so powerful and widespread that it became a deterrent for even the most moderately progressive figures to voice their ideas or beliefs publicly. In addition, the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, led to the imprisonment of many radical and Communist organizers of the era. (Source)

sectarianism arises when two or multiple forces of the same larger entity reach what seems to be an insurmountable disagreement, primarily over theoretical principles or theoretical interpretations. While disagreement is common and debate is an essential part of political education, sectarianism often prevents two groups or organizations from working together on the same issues or often divides an organization into multiple factions. “Simply put, sectarianism is the breakdown of solidarity.” (Source)

In Alabama, on March 25th, 1931, nine Black children, ranging from the ages of 13 to 19 were charged with the rape of two white women, found guilty, and sentenced to death in just a few weeks with almost no evidence tying them to the crime. Protests against the case erupted across the country and Harry Haywood and other Communist Party organizers traveled to the South to begin the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys. As communists were some of the only white people to testify in their defense and many progressive organizations, like the NAACP, were reluctant to get involved, the case marked the fierce anti-racist leadership of the U.S. communist movement. (Source)

The Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, of the former Soviet Union, was established in 1960 as a university that would open its doors to students from Asian, African, and Latin American countries to achieve a high-quality education and to bring back knowledge and skills to their home countries. The school is named after Congolese revolutionary and the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Nikita Khrushchev’s only demand for the students was: “Study diligently, don’t waste a single day, don’t miss a single opportunity to acquire knowledge, to study science and engineering.” (Source)

In the late 1950s-early 1960s, U.S. imperialist pressure began to break down the relations between the United Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Once former comrade-ly allies, by 1963, the Sino-Soviet Split had become public and many U.S. liberation movements suffered greatly because of the divisions caused by the hostile political relationship that developed between two powerful socialist countries. (Source)