Louise Thompson Patterson

From DefendDissent

“Here I was in prison for the crime of attending a meeting” 1934 In the Birmingham of the 1930s, demonstrations for relief from the depression were as intolerable to the authorities as were those for relief from segregation in the Birmingham of the 1960s. Police beat up speakers at meetings, attacked crowds, and raided the homes of suspected leaders. And the Birmingham city commissioners unanimously approved a strict criminal anarchy ordinance to “curb communism.” Venturing into Alabama from New York City, Louise Thomson Patterson tried to organize chapters of the left-wing International Workers Order (WTO) among the black workers in the South.

Louise Thompson Patterson

From an interview with Louise Thomson Patterson in We Will Be Heard:

I came to the IWO as an office worker in 1933. The IWO was a fraternal group for immigrant workers. It gave them some home, some base in this country, and it provided them with low-cost insurance. After I worked in the office awhile, I expressed an interest in organizing. I went down to Alabama and Georgia and down to New Orleans. I got groups together through churches or through local trade unions and organized chapters of the IWO. This I did in 1933 and 1934. I was in Birmingham when the coal strike was on. I had gone to a meeting in a middle-class white neighborhood. When I opened the door, the police were in the middle of a raid. I was so stunned. The woman who lived there tried to protect me: “I have no sewing for you today.” But this one cop said, “Oh no. That won’t go. I know you’re one of them. Goddamn you, you come in here.”

They took me off to an ancient city jail. This one, like all the others in Alabama, was segregated. About fifty black women were there in a long room. At the end of the room was one filthy bathroom. I didn’t sleep all night. The next morning, they told me they were going to take my picture and fingerprints. I met Bull Connor [Birmingham’s future public safety commissioner] in the elevator. He said “Whatcha got there? They said, “We got one of them Yankee bitches. We ought to do like Mussolini does, put them up against the wall and shoot them.” They transferred me to the county jail, which was a modern building. As we went in, I noticed a saying over the door about justice—and here I was in prison for the crime of attending a meeting.

--(Bud and Ruth Schultz, We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present, Merrell. Used by permission of the authors. Buy it at Powell's Books)