Biography
Carl Patterson was the chief leader of the UCAPAWA cotton pickers' strike in California's San Joaquin Valley in October 1939. He was jailed by Madera County authorities, who seized strike funds addressed to him as a pretext for the arrest; some twenty-one Madera cotton strikers were held in the county jail for about two weeks during the same crackdown. Patterson had earlier been active in the United Farmers’ League and the Western Cooperative Dairymen’s Union. He lived in Livingston, Merced County, and was the Communist Party’s candidate for Congress in California’s 9th District in 1936.
