Update and Inquiry Cousin Lloyd Patterson Portrait

Re: Lloyd Patterson Portrait and Article
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

From:
"Andy Leddy"

To:
"Lydia Percy"

Thanks for your note. You can see how often I check this e-mail address! Sorry for the delay in responding.

Lots going on with my portrait of Lloyd Patterson - the Smithsonian is interested, but I'm still interested in getting an article published first. I am actually trying to find James to see if he would loan me a photograph he said he has - one of his father, Lloyd, and Langston Hughes together. That photo would really help my presentation quite a bit.

I have an old address for him. On I St, SE in DC. Do you happen to have a current address? Believe me, I know he's hard to find and connect with, so I'm not holding out great hopes. Still, I have to try. Any thoughts would be most welcome.

Thanks,
Andy



Hi Andy,

I will be awaiting the article on my Cousin LLoyd Patterson. With reference to James he has not been well for sometime now and is pretty much in seclusion. He resides with our family in Washington presently (Kenneth Hamilton). I have some pictures James sent me from Russia years ago of his father but none with Langston Hughes I do have articles of Paul Robeson with Lloyd when they all went to Russia. Please forward your article when you are done we would love to see it. Any further information I will be happy to provide at best.

Also our family has the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance you can google this book by
Cary D. Wintz, Paul Finkelman - 2004 - Art - 1341 pages

The first was Lloyd Patterson, a graduate of Hampton Institute (1931) who had ... He preceded Paul Robeson in the role of Othello (which was then rarely ...

Thanks,
Lydia


FYI

Brief Biography on James Lloydovich Patterson (Russian: Джеймс Ллойдович Паттерсон; born 17 July 1933) is a Russian writer and child actor of African American descent.

James Lloydovich Patterson was born in Moscow on July 17, 1933, the eldest of three children born to an African American immigrant to the Soviet Union and his Russian wife. Having arrived in the USSR as an unemployed actor looking for work during the Great Depression in 1932, James Patterson's father Lloyd Patterson, just twenty-two, decided to remain permanently after meeting and falling in love with James' mother, the theater artist Vera Ippolitovna Aralova.

James Patterson appeared in the Soviet cinema as a baby in the 1936 hit Soviet film Circus – where, parallel to his own life, he played the role of the dark-skinned child of an interracial couple being brought up in the manner of the politically egalitarian ideals officially embraced by the Soviet system.

Following Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, James and his mother were evacuated to the east, while his father, who had obtained a position with Soviet radio as a presenter for English-speaking listeners abroad, remained on the job in Moscow. He died during the war after suffering serious wounds in the bombardment of the city in 1942.[1]

James was a member of the Komsomol and graduated from the Riga Nakhimov Naval School, a prestigious military academy for boys of high-school age, in 1951.[1] Lauded as a model cadet, he proceeded to receive further training as a submariner in Leningrad. Commissioned as an officer in the Soviet Navy, Patterson began serving with the Black Sea Fleet in 1955.[1]

By the 1960s, Patterson's professional ambitions had turned to writing. Still serving in the navy, he published his first literary debut, the poetry collection Russia. Africa in 1963. Leaving the Soviet Navy, Patterson graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1964, drawing inspiration from subjects as diverse as the sea, the beginning of the Space Age, and the racial tension around the time of the desegregation efforts of the American civil rights movement. Having authored a number of works by the late 1960s, he was admitted as a member of the USSR Union of Writers in 1967.

The sweeping political and economic changes during the breakdown of the Soviet Union were also accompanied by profound difficulties for the new Russian society; a frequent visitor to his father's homeland, James Patterson and his mother immigrated to the United States from the Russian Federation in the 1990s.[1]

Selected works by James Lloyd Patterson
• «Россия. Африка» (Russia. Africa, poems 1963)
• «Хроника левой руки: Новеллы.» М., 1964 (Chronicles of the Left Hand: Novellas, 1964)
• «Рождение ливня‎» (Birth of the Rain, poems, 1973)
• «Взаимодействие» (Interaction, poems, 1978)
• «Зимние ласточки» (Winter Swallows, poems, 1980)
• «Красная лилия» (The Red Lily, poems, 1984)