Louise Thompson & The First March on Washington
Special Women's History Month Bonus Edition
It’s Women’s History Month and I wanted to share a story about one of the most important organizers of the 20th century, Louise Thompson Patterson. I think more people should know about her and her work. You can read her 1936 essay “Toward a Brighter Dawn” which foreshadows future theorization about interlocking oppressions and also intersectionality. In the essay, Thompson discusses the “triple exploitation” of Black women thirteen years before the publication of Claudia Jones’s article “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” which coined the term “superexploitation.” She also co-authored along with Beah Richards the manifesto, A Call to Negro Women in 1951.
Hope you enjoy reading!
I purchased this vintage newswire photo on Ebay. It’s a prized possession.
The caption on the back reads:
“ACME PHOTO” WASHINGTON BUREAU.
RUBY BATES LEADS PARADE ON WHITE HOUSE.
Ruby Bates, 19-YEAR-OLD ALABAMA MILL WORKER LED A PARADE OF 2000 SCOTTSBORO MARCHERS ON THE WHITE HOUSE MAY 8TH IN AN APPEAL FOR THE RELEASE OF THE NINE NEGRO YOUTHS WHOM SHE SAID ATTACKED HER ON AN ALABAMA FREIGHT TRAIN. PHOTO SHOWS: A CLOSEUP ON RUBY BATES (BETWEEN TWO NEGRO WOMEN) AS SHE MARCHED IN THE PARADE.
This essay is about one of the “two negro women” in this photograph.
Louise Thompson and the First March on Washington
On May 8, 1933, 31-year-old Louise Thompson stood before a crowd of over 4000 marchers at Seaton Park near the Washington Capitol. They were gathered to demand the acquittal and release of the Scottsboro Boys: Nine Black youth falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931.
Thompson, one of the key organizers of the march, was a small woman, but she spoke with great confidence. The march, she declared, was “only the beginning.” “Another time will come,” she said, “when 500,000, even a million marchers” would march for civil rights and freedom in Washington.
According to Louise’s biographer Keith Gilyard, the 1933 March was “the first mass rally in Washington, D.C.” As Thompson predicted, it would be followed 30 years later by the famous 1963 March on Washington in which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech and by the Million Man March in 1995.
Though later marches would be larger, the first was vital in raising awareness of the Scottsboro trials and in aiding the cause of the accused. Thompson, a Communist with strong connections to labor organizing, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance, played a key role in organizing the march and creating a broad coalition to support the Scottsboro youth.
Before the March
Louise Thompson was born in 1901 in Chicago and grew up primarily on the West Coast. After college at Berkeley, she taught in Arkansas and then at the Hampton Institute, a legendary historically Black college (HBCU) in Virginia. Students at the school staged a protest in 1927 against the administration’s paternalism and racism. Thompson backed them—her first experience with protest tactics. Disillusioned with the school, and estranged from the administration, she left in 1928 and moved to Harlem. There, among many other jobs, she worked as an assistant to both Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
In Harlem, Thompson also became more involved in civil rights causes and in left activism. Taking part in Marxist study circles made her see the connection between racial, gender, and class exploitation. In 1940, she married her second husband, William Patterson, a well-respected Black Communist lawyer who headed the International Labor Defense (ILD) and later the Civil Rights Congress. William was a key architect of the Communist party’s campaign of mass protest for the Scottsboro Boys after their arrest in 1931.
Louise got involved in the Scottsboro defense as well, but a trip to the Soviet Union in 1932 interrupted her participation. When she returned, the press dubbed her “Madame Moscow.” Unfazed, she took a job with the ILD, the legal arm of the Communist Party, which was working on the Scottsboro defense.
Thompson and the Scottsboro Case
A lawyer from Alabama, hired by a minister's group with NAACP help, initially represented the Scottsboro defendants. The defense, however, was ineffective and the defendants and their mothers brought ILD lawyers in to handle the case. The Communist Party organized protests in multiple countries. In Germany, Ada Wright, the mother of two defendants, spoke at a rally attended by 150,000 people.
Communist Party involvement, and the mass protest tactics, created tension with the NAACP. The organization was unhappy about losing control of the case and anxious about a racist backlash from the demonstrations. W. E. B. Du Bois, a role model and mentor to Louise Thompson, criticized the Communist party's intervention and argued that it would result in the defendants' murder.
Despite NAACP skepticism, a major break in the case occurred when 19-year-old Ruby Bates, one of the sex workers who accused the defendants of rape, recanted her accusations. Thompson worked with Bates personally and characterized her as “a decent person who wasn’t ready to kill nine black boys who didn’t rape her.”
The March
Despite Bates’s testimony, the jury reconvicted defendant Haywood Patterson (no relation to William) in April 1933. The ILD moved quickly to organize more demonstrations. Louise coordinated several of these in the New York area. CPUSA pioneered mass participatory defense. The Party recognized the need to raise global awareness about anti-blackness and fight for freedom and justice.
William H. Davis, a New York newspaper publisher, suggested a march on Washington immediately after the April verdict. Davis soon backed off the idea, but the ILD embraced it.
Louise Thompson was tasked with making the march a reality. She helped form the Scottsboro Action Committee and served as its national executive secretary. Her goal was to draw support not just from Harlem, but from the entire East Coast and beyond.
Thompson set up headquarters in an office on 135th Street in Harlem. She and her small team of 3 to 4 young women fundraised, recruited marchers, and organized transportation and other logistics.
The effort succeeded beyond Thompson’s hopes. On May 6, 135th Street was packed with protestors eager to set off to Washington. According to Louise, remembering the scene:
“The streets, the whole block was just like a huge mass gathering itself. And people of every category were there: old people, young people, mothers with babies in their arms, children. It was something else. I think it actually frightened me when I saw what was happening.”
There were so many people that Thompson had to find more charter buses and delay the morning departure for Philadelphia until 1 PM. More marchers joined there and in Baltimore, where Bates spoke to a crowd of several thousand. On May 7, in Washington DC, Bates spoke to another gathering at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, where she said that the Scottsboro defendants were innocent. They were framed, she said “not only by the boys and girls on the freight train, of which I was one, but by the bosses of the southern counties.”
On May 8, the 4000-5000 protestors marched from northeastern DC to the White House. Louise marched arm in arm with Ruby Bates on one side and Janie Patterson, the mother of defendant Haywood on the other. Protest signs demanded the release of the Scottsboro nine, but also advocated for freedom for death-row prisoner Euel Lee, labor leader Tom Mooney, and activist Angelo Herndon.
At the White House, Louise was one of about twenty-five demonstrators who entered and demanded to meet with the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR, however, refused to see them. William Patterson and a small delegation did meet with Speaker of the House, Henry Rainey, and Vice President John Garner. They left a petition with 20,000 signatures. They then continued to Seaton Park, where Louise predicted that this was just the first of many civil rights marches on the capital. She also argued that the march was an important moment in interracial solidarity, symbolized by the presence of Ruby Bates and Janie Patterson.
The Legacy of the March
In June, the judge in Haywood Patterson’s case set aside the conviction and ordered a new trial. Louise believed this was evidence that the mass protest was effective.
Ultimately, the ILD got prosecutors to drop charges against four defendants and reduce charges against another as part of a plea deal. Four were convicted of rape—though not sentenced to death. This was the first time a Black defendant was not sentenced to death for rape in Alabama.
This was not anything like a complete success. However, some defendants were released, and the trials set important precedents, including establishing the right to a competent defense and declaring the exclusion of African Americans from juries as illegal. Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP praised the ILD, arguing that:
“Through its activity in the Scottsboro case the ILD has made it impossible for the Negro bourgeoisie in the future to be as complacent and supine before racial injustices as it was prior to Scottsboro. It has introduced the Negro to the possibilities and tactics of mass pressure.”
Patterson After the March
Louise Thompson Patterson continued her involvement in left politics and antiracist activism long after the first march on Washington. In the 30s, she worked as an organizer for the International Workers Order (IWO), which provided insurance and aid to workers.
In the early 50s, she helped start Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a radical left Black women led organization that protested discrimination against Black left intellectuals like W.E.B.Du Bois and Claudia Jones. Sojourners also worked to free Rosa Lee Ingram, a widowed mother sentenced to death for killing a white man who attempted to rape her. Other members of the group included Charlotta Bass, Beah Richards, Eslanda Goode Robeson and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Louise served as the executive secretary of Sojourners for Truth and Justice. She traveled across NYC and the country to fundraise and to meet with small groups of Black women to create chapters of the group.
In the 1970s, Patterson was deeply involved in protests and other efforts to free radical scholar and activist Dr. Angela Davis. She lived long enough to see both the 1963 March on Washington and the Million Man March, fulfilling her prediction that there would be more, and larger civil rights protests in DC. Patterson died in 1999 at the age of 97.
Louise Patterson had a significant impact on Black intellectual, political, and cultural movements. These include the Harlem Renaissance, Black Marxism, Black left feminism, Popular Front activism, and Black Power. She was a cultural worker, an organizer, a feminist, a committed internationalist, and a revolutionary. She lived a generous, generative, and capacious life. More people should know who she is and all that she contributed to making us more free.
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References:
Robert S. Boynton, “The Lives They Lived: Louise Patterson, b. 1901; The Red and the Black,” New York Times, January 2, 2000.
Keith Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice, Duke University Press, 2017.
Liberation School, “Louise Patterson on the Scottsboro Struggle,” August 13, 2018.
Craig Simpson, “’Scottsboro Boys’—New Tactics & Strategy for Civil Rights,” February 19, 2013.
150 Years of Women at Berkeley, “Louise Alone Thompson Patterson.”
If you’re in NYC on April 6, come visit Sojourners for Justice Press’s table at the NYC Feminist Zinefest.
A fascinating read. Thank you. Your writing gives courage.
What an engaging read! Thank you for the education ✨ I was so intrigued by Louise Thompson after reading this I continued to explore more, down a rabbit hole that led me to series of interviews from Louise Thompson's daughter -Mary Louise Patterson- describing the influence her revolutionary parents have had on her life and upbringing. Just beautiful. Thank you again ⚡❤️