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October 2005: Randall K. Burkett

Emory University’s Curator of African American Collections Prepares Premiere of Documentary on Louise Alone Thompson Patterson

On Monday, October 17, 2005 (4:00 p.m., free), a documentary film about Louise Thompson Patterson, a leader among civil rights activists and American Communists in the U.S. and Europe, premieres in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library. The showing of the documentary, Louise Alone Thompson Patterson: In Her Own Words, by award-winning filmmaker Louis Massiah, will be followed by a panel discussion with scholars and activists, including Patterson’s own daughter, Dr. MaryLouise Patterson. Patterson’s papers and library are archived at Emory. For more information about the film and panel, call 404-727-7620.

Randall K. Burkett, PhD, curator of African American Collections, has helped to organize this event to bring the attention of the academic community and the community at large to Emory University’s large collection of Louise Alone Thompson Patterson’s papers, a vital part of American history. The collection includes extensive correspondence with Langston Hughes; correspondence concerning the film “The Negro in American Life,” scheduled to be made in the Soviet Union in 1932 and never completed; documentation of the Harlem Suitcase Theatre co-founded with Langston Hughes; and records of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a national black women's organization co-founded with Beah Richards.

Q: You have been in the field of African American collections for a long time. What got you interested?

A: When I was in my last year in graduate school working on master’s—this was 1968—I got into big fights with my church history professors about how we could spend two weeks studying the Shakers and not read one word on 20 percent of our population, so I started doing these research papers to try to convince these professors to change their courses. I did not convince them, but in doing the research I convinced myself that African American history was far more interesting than what I was studying. So I did my PhD in African American history, on the intersection of black religion and black radicalism in the 1920s.

Q: What is the significance of this documentary on Louise Patterson?

A: The film sheds light on Louise Thompson Patterson herself, and on her place in African American and American culture and politics.

Q: Why is the documentary premiering here at Emory?

A: Last year, Special Collections curated an exhibition of Langston Hughes’s papers drawn from the Crawford and Patterson collections. We held a symposium and invited both daughters to talk about their parents [Patterson’s daughter and the Crawfords’ daughter were both instrumental in bringing their parents’ collections to Emory University]. When Louis Massiah, my friend and colleague and also a friend of Dwight Andrew’s [ Emory University associate professor in music theory and jazz studies], made this documentary, we said, ‘Let’s have a panel and a discussion, and make the film a part of the documentation of Louise’s life.’ This documentary and panel discussion is another way to let our own academic community and the larger community know about this person and about the important papers that are here.

Q: How did Emory acquire Patterson’s papers?

A: It took over a year of conversations with MaryLouise Patterson, who is a physician, before Emory acquired her mother’s papers. I went up to New York, where Dr. Patterson lives, and she came down to visit Emory. At the time, several institutions were interested in Dr. Patterson’s papers. At issue was not the dollar amount for the purchase; the question for Dr. Patterson was what was the context that this collection would fit in, how would the papers be seen in an academic context. That was her interest. After a year, she decided that Emory was the place for the papers. Part of the draw for her was that we also wanted her mother’s library.

We were also able to obtain the Matt and Evelyn Crawford papers, also through their daughter. The Crawfords and Pattersons and Langston Hughes were intimate, lifelong friends. We have a wonderful Hughes collection, including original drafts of poems that Hughes had sent either to the Crawfords or the Pattersons. It includes two sets of the Hughes-authored books—one set inscribed to Patterson and one inscribed to the Crawfords. And so one of the things that made Emory attractive to both of the daughters was that we wanted the libraries as well as the manuscripts. That was part of our proposal, to see the intellectual universe from which these people were drawing. So we ended up with two extraordinary collections of two very important former Communist Party members.

Q: How did Emory’s Special Collections first get involved in collecting the papers of important African Americans in the American Communist Party (ACP)?

A: Emory has for a long time collected materials related to American Communism, particularly through the research interests of such faculty members in political science as Harvey Klehr [ Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History in the Department of Political Science at Emory, whose current research interests center around American communism and Soviet espionage in America]. Dr. Klehr was instrumental in our getting the papers of Theodore Draper, an important scholar who was interested in black nationalism. Because of Klehr, by the time I got here in 1997, Emory already had hundreds, maybe thousands, of pamphlets related to the ACP. Then when I came to Emory, it occurred to me that, with this already existing strength, we should look for African Americans who were involved in Communism or on the left to build on this strength.

More generally, every library that collects rare books and manuscripts, if they’re focusing on American studies or dealing with any aspect of culture—art, literature, poetry—they need to be thinking about the African American component that would be a part of that story. Too many times the African American aspects get separated out. I firmly believe that every institution that conducts American cultural studies needs to be thinking systematically about this.

I must say I am enormously excited about the level of support and interest and enthusiasm that I’ve found among our faculty, among our own library staff, from graduate studies, within the African American community in Atlanta, and elsewhere. People have been very supportive of building in this area. We have obtained some extraordinary materials from all over the country and outside the U.S. For example, we found 1,200 letters of Josephine Baker’s, to or from her, in one collection. One area we collect in is expatriate African American literary and cultural figures, so that specific collection fit directly in one our five principal areas of collection. We also have the papers of Bricktop [a vaudevillian, saloon entertainer, international host, and nightclub owner, born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith] and some wonderful Chester Himes papers.

Q: When did you join Emory University’s Special Collections?

A: I came here in 1997, saying I would commute from Massachusetts for two years—and eight years later, I’m still around. The work is so exciting, and there are so many collections still in process. You get these projects going, and you need to bring them to fruition, so I am still here.

Q: When you are not here in Atlanta or out collecting, what do you do?

A: I have a great garden in Massachusetts. When I get home, I love to work in the garden. I have a swale, a fernery, and a fountain. It’s something so completely different from what I do for a living. Even when I get home at midnight, I turn on all the lights and walk around the yard.

About the Premiere and Panel
Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was a participant in the Harlem Renaissance, leader among civil rights activists, and long-time member of the Communist Party. The film will be introduced by its award-winning director, Louis Massiah, and will be followed by a panel of scholars and activists, including Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland; Dorothy Burnham, lifelong activist and friend of Louise Patterson; Gerald Horne, University of Houston; and MaryLouise Patterson, daughter of Louise Thompson Patterson. The panel will be moderated by the Emory provost, Earl Lewis.

Edited by Nancy Condon
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory

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