William L. Patterson

And Clark gives a couple of comments that lets us know he's not just talking about those days because he came to New York in 1933, became a protege, a junior protege of Arturo Schaumburg, became a friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston, who were talked about and all these kind of things.

And as he's talking and thinking with them, as he's sitting there next to William Patterson.

With Louise Thompson Patterson there, it's quite a film.

As he's sitting there, the question he asks, you know, is what does this mean today? How does this move forward today? And they're all thinking about that.

To see William and Louise Thompson Patterson, the incredible couple, talk about the meaning of collective action and ideology.

Man, I'm saying that's William Thompson.

I mean, William Patterson sitting there, my God.

To see George Schuyler.

And so I was the director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress.

The Civil Rights Congress was a national organization headed by William Patterson, a black, who'd been a leader before of the International Labor Defense and many other things.

He was one of the people who got the Scottsboro case that you were talking about before, you know, who was a prime mover in that.

But, so, Absolutely all of our life for years and years and years in Oakland was taken up with fighting against police brutality and fighting for the rights of blacks on every level, including housing, employment, and that kind of thing.

Yeah, tell me about that because that whole thing was fascinating to me.

Yeah, I mean this comes back to what I mentioned with China, right? And actually I think one useful comparison that I also use is this We Charge Genocide campaign that was filed by this African-American communist named William Patterson who argued that there was this – a structural genocide against the black population in the US.

And this was in 51 or 52 that he filed that at the UN.

And, you know, this is a time where we still had like open apartheid in the south.