Meriwether is an executive board member of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), an NGO co-founded in 1991 by Jayne Cortez and Ama Ata Aidoo "for the purpose of establishing links between professional African women writers".
Louise grew up in the decade of the Great Depression, a time that would deeply affect her young life and ultimately influence her as a writer.
She attended Public School 81 in Harlem and graduated from Central Commercial High School in downtown Manhattan.
She was an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children.
She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem, New York City, during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.