Beyond the Typewriter: Louise “Lady Moscow” Thompson’s Writings Against the Color-Line

Dr. Tamlyn Avery is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Adelaide University, Australia, specializing in 19^th– and 20^th-century literature and modernism. She is currently preparing a book “Writing the Collar-Line” about the racial politics of white-collar work and the ‘typewriter revolution’ of the 1880s to 1940s, and its impact on African American literary history and ideas of authorship. Louise Thompson Patterson is a key figure in that project. Dr. Avery is a 2025 recipient of a Rose Library African American History and Culture visiting researcher fellowship.

Louise Thompson Patterson is a fascinating figure on the American left about whom too little is known. If she is remembered at all, it is usually in relation to the several months she worked as a typist-secretary for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1920s, or to note that she typed her first husband Wallace Thurman’s novel The Blacker the Berry (1929). William Maxwell once noted in his Old Left, New Negro: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999) that a heighted interest in recovering lost figures of the Harlem Renaissance since the 1980s paradoxically resulted in Thompson’s reduction to a mere “helpmeet” of more famous authors. Thirty years later, Thompson is yet to receive proper recognition for her active role in Harlem Renaissance cultural production and shaping the radical activism of the 1930s–1960s that followed. Thompson’s papers attest that her life’s work cannot be reduced, as it too often is, to that of a mere “typewriter”: a 19^th term popularized in the 20^th century to dismiss women’s clerical work as expendable, mechanical textual labor, devoid of intellectual significance or value. Related to my research for a book I am writing about the impact of the typewriter revolution and segregated white-collar practices on African American literary history, I was awarded a Rose Library short-term fellowship to visit the Louise Thompson Patterson (LTP) Papers. In particular, I sought to address these misunderstanding about Thompson by accessing the LTP Memoirs Project produced in the 1980s and 90s, when Thompson worked with numerous academics, editors, stenographers, and daughter Mary-Lou to produce hundreds of pages of dictated and carefully edited typescript about her life. What these papers make legible is this woman’s extraordinary life as a cultural and political activist, her career coinciding with many of the most profound gendered and racial struggles for labor and civil rights in American history between 1900 and 1998.

Born in 1901 in the Far West, she experienced isolation and racial persecution as a young African American, experiences which revealed to her the limits of American progressive-era democracy. In 1923, Thompson became one of the few African American women at that time to graduate (cum laude) from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied economics, where she learnt business communications skills, including typewriting and shorthand. She was hired to teach business, English grammar, and Spanish at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, not far from Elaine where one of the most violent race riots had broken out in 1919 after the Black sharecroppers there attempted to unionize but were struck down by white antiunion agitators. In reflecting on the difficulties she witnessed as her working-class students struggled to type, learn shorthand, and learn the appropriate white-collar behaviours associated with the business world of capitalist America, Thompson perceptively elaborates how the region’s two primary struggles, labor and racial struggles, were inimically linked and limited by the limitations of white philanthropy to support their political awakening.

My overarching goal in consulting the papers which was to access her unpublished memoir drafts produced in the 1980s and 90s to investigate her role in the Harlem Renaissance, especially the nature of her work typing for Hughes and Hurston under the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white philanthropist who sought to foster ‘racial primitivism’ among African American artists. But the above revelations broadened my understanding of her radical trajectory, adding nuance to what I had originally sought to uncover in the LTP memoirs. Producing ‘clean’ typed copy was an essential part of literary texts’ preparation for publication, but was onerous, often repetitive work; hence, it was usually outsourced to professionals (for a fee) or friends or family¾mostly female, given it was often viewed as reproductive ‘women’s work.’ While her memoirs describe the typing of Thurman’s novels as good “fun”, the production of Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), and much of Hurston’s Of Mules and Men (1935) was more complicated. Mason’s overbearing demands that Hughes produce art that aligned to her views of African-derived art plus derisive comments about the typist’s work resulted in Thompson quitting in fury.

While her work for Mason has overshadowed Thompson’s longer career, what came after suggests the ways that typewriting, as form of labor, did in fact widen Black women’s opportunities to engage in the world of work and the public and political sphere. Disillusioned by white philanthropy, Thompson steered her efforts into becoming a key organizational figure within a broader shift from nationalism to internationalism in twentieth-century Black intellectualism. She travelled extensively across the Soviet Union, to investigate viable politicoeconomic alternatives to American capitalism, which she felt aggravated racial segregation and economic inequality. After organizing a groundbreaking trip with a group that included Hughes and the author Dorothy West to the Soviet Union in 1932 to produce the pioneering “Black and White” film about African American life (unfortunately it was never made due to production difficulties), she found other ways to use her administrative skills to promote local and global radical organizing. In addition to liaising with Soviet Union comrades, she joined many anti-fascist Americans who travelled to Francoist Spain, including Ernest Hemingway. Thompson reported on the fight against fascism there; like Hughes and Du Bois, she observed direct parallels between European fascism and the Jim Crow U.S., conceiving of the latter as a struggle between American-style fascism and antifascism.

The LTP Papers construct the portrait of a woman who was an unapologetic, committed Black Marxist and Communist, often risking her personal security in the pursuit of racial, economic, and sexual justice. Her work for the International Labor Defense organization (part of the Comintern’s international network) further suggests how despite habituated racial and gender discrimination in white-collar practices, the potential for new kinds of radical administrative work for women was unleashed by the exponential growth of leftwing organizations from the Great Depression. Joining forces with influential figures including Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, Thompson oversaw labor and racial equality initiatives, speaking and writing regularly and extensively about alternatives to capitalism that could lessen racial and gender oppression. She theorized Black women’s labor issues in ways that anticipated the concerns of contemporary Black feminism, coining the term “triple exploitation” in 1936 to conceptualize how Black working-class women are triply disadvantaged under capitalism. This anticipated more current terms such as “intersectionality.” At a time when manual and white-collar workers were pitted against one another for social status, to the benefit of managers and bosses, she called for domestic and professional working women alike to come together in solidarity to fight for their rights as workers.

Through her administrative role in the International Labor Defense organization in the 1930s, Thompson became involved in the famous Scottsboro case (1931–1937), in which nine African American teenagers were falsely accused of having assaulted two white women in Alabama. In an extraordinary gesture, Thompson closely engaged Ruby Bates, one white woman at the case’s centre who admitted to having given false testimony. Thompson staged a powerful media stunt, marching arm-in-arm with both Bates and the mother of the accused Haywood Patterson, as mass protests for the boys’ release swept the streets.

Starting out as an administrative worker for the International Workers Organization, she soon rose to the role of president, overseeing initiatives that fostered interracial solidarity and antiracism in the labor movement. Thirty years before Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Thompson was arrested there under similar pretexts (“vagrancy”) for supporting striking coal miners to unionize on behalf of the IWO. The right-wing press labelled her “Lady Moscow” due her Communist affiliations, a moniker she embraced with her typically irreverent sense of humour. Both she and her second husband William Patterson (an activist lawyer whose memoirs can also be accessed in the Rose Library) were surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both spent time in jail for their political beliefs, and assisted many other political prisoners who were persecuted by the State. Through her work in the Political Prisoner Defence Organization, Thompson became close to Angela Davis, helping secure financial support for her legal defences. Even at the height of the McCarthy era, Thompson refused to deny her party ties, despite the risks. She even influenced others including her lifelong mentor Du Bois to join the Communist Party in 1961, aged 93. Like Thompson, he believed that racism was the engine of global capitalism, hence their shared socialist belief that the only way to abolish segregation and racism in the U.S. was for workers of all races to unite against capitalism.

From a Marxist perspective, Thompson grappled with more local questions of what work means including the essentialized imaginative ‘types’ of workers society ascribes to different kinds of work under capitalism in ways that limit those workers’ agency, the “typewriter” being one classic example. While at the Rose Library, I visited a fascinating exhibit there called “Striking Characters,” about the world of typewriter machines and the cultural practitioners who used them, in which Thompson’s typed correspondences with Hughes were featured. The exhibition brilliantly emphasized the creative potential that the typewriter’s invention as symbolizing new possibilities for literary innovation. But it is worth noting that by 1930, 98% of professional typists were white women, meaning that racial and gendered labor practices in white-collar spaces impacted almost all U.S. literary publishing houses and also many radical organizations. While little remarked upon, this fact was often noted in twentieth-century African American literature, including Thurman’s satirical semi-autobiographical novel of the Harlem Renaissance Infants of the Spring (1932), in which Thompson is remembered as a typist who despises the nature of her work typing for white philanthropists. The LTP papers thus indicate that writing is both the result of thinking and habits that are conditioned not only by our writing materials, but the contexts of labor that allow for their production.

Typing alongside her friend Hughes, she nevertheless remained committed to the idea that radical aesthetics could reimagine more ideal alternatives to these limiting ways of thinking about work and its social relations. Spanning 1901–1999, her memoirs and archive make legible an incisive story about the many individuals and organizations who fought for liberation and equality over that time period, narrated by a remarkable woman who typewrote them and herself into history.