Raymond R. Patterson

Raymond Richard Patterson was born on December 14, 1929, in Harlem, New York, the son of Leonard Patterson, a railroad worker, and Mildred Clark Patterson. He was raised in Harlem and educated in the New York City public schools before the family later moved to Long Island. That early Harlem grounding, amid one of the great centers of Black American culture, would shape a lifetime devoted to poetry and to the stewardship of African American literary memory.

Patterson earned his bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he served as class poet and won the Boretone Mountain Poetry Award, and he later completed a master's degree in English at New York University. After service in the United States Army from 1951 to 1953, he taught at Benedict College in South Carolina and in the New York City public schools, joining the faculty of City College of the City University of New York in 1968, where he taught until his retirement in 1992.

His signal work, Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Black Man and Other Poems (1969), answered Wallace Stevens' famous poem with a searching meditation on Black identity and dignity, and remains his most celebrated achievement. He followed it with Elemental Blues (1983) and wrote librettos for composer Hale Smith's operas David Walker and Goree, joining the currents of poetry and music.

In 1973 Patterson founded the Langston Hughes Festival and its Langston Hughes Medal at City College, directing it for two decades and honoring the elders and heirs of the Black literary tradition he loved. He died on April 5, 2001, at the age of seventy-one. We honor Raymond R. Patterson, keeper of a people's poetry and builder of the house in which their voices are remembered.