MaryLouise Patterson, is the daughter of Langston Hughes’s cherished friends Louise Thompson Patterson, and William L. Patterson. Hughes was a frequent guest at the Patterson’s home and was like an uncle to MaryLouise. In 2016 she co-authored with Evelyn Louise Crawford a book entitled “Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond” in which they attempted to show Langston’s belief that a better world was a worker’s world had never died.
MaryLouise will start by showing a 17 minute video that introduces an audience to her parents, her co-author’s parents and their 40+ year relationship with Langston Hughes. After which she’ll discuss her upbringing in the home of African American communists and their relationship to Paul Robeson, many African American artists, the Black Panthers and more.
Speaker bio: Dr. MaryLouise Patterson is a retired general pediatrician from Weill-Cornell Medical College and New York Hospital in New York City. Born in Chicago to two labor and community activists who were longtime members of the Communist Party, Louise and William Patterson. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Patterson earned her medical degree from Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, USSR and a Master’s of Public Health, from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the first African-American woman to graduate from medical school in the USSR.
Upon returning to the US she joined the Communist Party, recruited by a childhood friend who was also a red diaper baby.
Like all of you over the many decades she’s put her shoulder to the plow and participated in hundreds of activities for freedom, justice, peace and socialism.
