Louise Alone Thompson Patterson (September 9, 1901 – August 27, 1999) 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. Early years Born in Chicago, Illinois, Patterson graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1923. She became a professor at the renowned Hampton Institute, a historically black college (HBCU) in Virginia by age twenty-two and she worked there for five years. Patterson moved to New York to join the burgeoning artistic community in Harlem. When she first went to New York, she pursued social work, but eventually she became a central figure in the literary movement. Trans-national activism 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 authors 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. Domestic activism After graduating from college, Patterson taught at Virginia's Hampton Institute, where she led a student uprising against the predominantly white administration's paternalistic policies. Throughout the protests, on each Sunday afternoon the African-American students that attended Hampton constantly sang old-time plantation songs towards white visitors. Afterwards, Patterson was quite unwelcome at the Institute. This forced her to move to New York City, rapidly becoming involved with many members of the Harlem Renaissance. This was due to