In 1911, William Patterson (1890-1980) was the first African-American to

graduate from Tam High School in Mill Valley, CA and played on the

school's baseball and football teams. 

He went onto become a  civil rights attorney, political activist, and long-

time leader in the American Communist Party.  We was born in San

Francisco, earned a law degree from the University of California in 1919,

and then studied in Moscow.   Returning to the United States in 1923, he

opened a law office in Harlem with two friends. After joining the Communist

Party a few years later, he became a regular contributor to the Communist

Daily Worker, and later oversaw the publication of the Worker and The Daily

World. He became involved in such controversial legal battles as the

Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1927 in which the two alleged anarchists were

executed, and that of the Scottsboro Boys in which seven African-

American youths were charged with raping two young women in Alabama.

He was the national executive secretary of the International Labor Defense

and headed the Civil Rights Congress, both leftist organizations. With Paul

Robeson, Patterson originated and delivered "We Charge Genocide," the

1951 petition to the United nations which charged the U.S. government with

genocide around the world. In the 1960s, he published his autobiography.  

(This information was copied from http://www.hometoharlem.com.)

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