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Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Online ISBN:
9780252095184
Print ISBN:
9780252037924
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Gerald Horne
Gerald Horne
University of Houston
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Published:
15 September 2013
Online ISBN:
9780252095184
Print ISBN:
9780252037924
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crow by virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. This watershed biography shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. The book highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, the book documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

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