1923, Louise Patterson earned his degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. She started working as a lecturer at the esteemed Hampton College, a historically black university in Virginia when she was 22. Patterson relocated to New York to become a part of the booming Harlem artistic scene. She initially worked in social work when she first moved to New York but later rose to prominence in a literary movement.
Although Thompson started one of the earliest salons in Harlem and orchestrated several rallies, she is best recognized for her close relationship with novelist Langston Hughes. Both admired the Soviet political system. In 1932, Thompson established the Friends of the Soviet Union group in Harlem.
Thompson was selected by the Communist Party of America to lead a group of 22 Harlem authors, artists, and intellectuals in producing a movie about prejudice in America for a Soviet film studio. This group included several prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance, including the writers Dorsey West and Langston Hughes.
Thompson and Hughes founded the Suitcase Theater in Harlem, which presented plays by Hughes and other black authors and featured All Black actors after the project failed due to a lack of funding and demands made by American businessmen to sever diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union. Thompson and Hughes had returned to the United States at that point. In 1932, Thompson accompanied a group of African-American performers on a trip to the Soviet Union.
After graduating, Patterson became a professor at Hampton College in Virginia, where she organized a student rebellion against the paternalistic laws of the predominantly white administration. Every Sunday afternoon during the protests, black students in the Hamptons performed traditional plantation songs to white guests nonstop.
Following that, Patterson lost all of his friends at the institute. She was compelled to relocate to New York City, so she rapidly made friends with numerous Harlem Renaissance figures. This is a result of her membership in and association with the Urban Institute, which supported her professional career at the New York School of Social Work.
