George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left his native Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party.
From there, he moved to the Soviet Union, where he was active in the party, and working on African independence movements. He also worked for the party in Germany but left after the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. In 1935, the official foreign policy of the USSR shifted, Britain and France, colonial powers with colonies in Africa, were now referred "democratic-imperialisms", a lower priority than the category of "fascist-imperialist" powers, Germany and Japan. This shift fell into direct contradiction with Padmore's prioritization of African independence, as Germany and Japan had no colonies in Africa. Padmore broke instantly with the Kremlin, but continued to support socialism ideologically.C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963). In 1939, the official view shifted again, as it did after 1941, and afterwards.
Padmore lived for a time in France, before settling in London, England, in 1934. Toward the end of his life he moved to Accra, Ghana, where he helped shape the politics of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party.
Biography
Early years
Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, better known by his pseudonym George Padmore, was born on 28 June 1903 in Arouca District, Tacarigua,James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore's Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (1967), p. 2."George Padmore commemorative plaque" , George Padmore Institute, 27 June 2011. Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies. His paternal great-grandfather was an Asante warrior who was taken prisoner and sold into slavery at Barbados, where his grandfather was born.Kevin Kelly Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era, UNC Press Books, 2006; p. 27. His father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was a local schoolmaster who had married Anna Susanna Symister of Antigua, a naturalist.
Nurse attended Tranquillity Intermediate College in Port of Spain, before going to St Mary's College for two years (1914 and 1915). He transferred to Pamphylian High School, graduating from there in 1918. After that, he worked for several years as a reporter with the Trinidad Publishing Company.Hooker, Black Revolutionary (1967), p. 3.
In late 1924, he travelled to the United States to take up medical studies at Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee. He had recently married, on 10 September that year,Bill Schwarz, "Chapter Six: George Padmore", in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, Manchester University Press, 2003, . and his wife Julia Semper would later join him in America. She left behind their daughter Blyden, who was born in 1925 (and died in 2012).Edwin S Wilson, "Blyden-Cowart: George Padmore’s daughter dies, February 3, 2012", Pambazuka News, 9 February 2012. According to Nurse's instruction, she was named in honour of the African nationalist Edward Blyden of Liberia.Hooker, Black Revolutionary (1967), pp. 4–5.Cameron Duodu, "Edward Wilmot Blyden, Grandfather of African Emancipation", Cameron Duodu Blogspot, 8 July 2011. Nurse subsequently registered at New York University but soon transferred to Howard University.
Communist Party During his college years in the US, Nurse became involved with the Workers (Communist) Party (CPUSA). When engaged in party business, he adopted the name George Padmore (compounding the Christian name of his father-in-law, Constabulary Sergeant-Major George Semper, and the surname of the friend who had been his best man, Errol Padmore).Hooker, Black Revolutionary (1967), p. 6.
Padmore officially joined the Communist Party in 1927 (when he was in Washington, D.C.) and was active in its mass organization targeted to black Americans, the American Negro Labor Congress.Mark Solomon, The Cry was Unity: Communists and African-Americans, 1917–1936, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998; p. 60. In March 1929 he was a fraternal (non-voting) delegate to the 6th National Convention of the CPUSA, held in New York City.Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Moscow, fond 515, opis 1, delo 1600, list 33. Available on microfilm as "Files of the Communist Party of the USA in the Comintern Archives," IDC Publishers, reel 122.
Padmore, an energetic worker and prolific writer, was tapped by Communist Party trade union leader William Z. Foster as a rising star. He was taken to Moscow to deliver a report on the formation of the Trade Union Unity League to the Communist International (Comintern) later in 1929. Following his presentation, Padmore was asked to stay on in Moscow to head the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). He was elected to the Moscow City Soviet.
As head of the Profintern's Negro Bureau, Padmore helped to produce pamphlet literature and contributed articles to Moscow's English-language newspaper, the Moscow Daily News.Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, pp. 177–78. He was also used periodically as a courier of funds from Moscow to various foreign Communist Parties.Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, p. 178.
In July 1930, Padmore was instrumental in organizing an international conference in Hamburg, Germany. It launched a Comintern-backed international organization of black labour organizations called the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Padmore lived in Vienna, Austria, during this time, where he edited the monthly publication of the new group, The Negro Worker.
In 1931, Padmore moved to Hamburg and accelerated his writing output, continuing to produce the ITUCNW magazine and writing more than 20 pamphlets in a single year. This German interlude came to an abrupt close by the middle of 1933, however, as the offices of the Negro Worker were ransacked by ultra-nationalist gangs following the Nazi seizure of power.Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, p. 179. Padmore was deported to England by the German government, while the Comintern placed the ITUCNW and its Negro Worker on hiatus in August 1933.
Disillusioned by what he perceived as the Comintern's flagging support for the cause of the independence of colonial peoples in favour of the Soviet Union's pursuit of diplomatic alliances with the colonial powers, Padmore abruptly severed his connection with the ITUCNW late in the summer of 1933.George Padmore, "An Open Letter to Earl Browder", The Crisis, October 1935, p. 302. The Comintern's disciplinary body, the International Control Commission (ICC), asked him to explain his unauthorized action. When he refused to do so, the ICC expelled him from the Communist movement on 23 February 1934. A phase of Padmore's political journey was at an end.
As a result of his membership in the Communist Party and working for it in the Soviet Union and Germany, Padmore was barred from re-entry into the United States. He was a non-citizen and the government did not want to admit known communists.Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, p. 177.
Pan-Africanist
Although alienated from Stalinism, Padmore remained a socialist. He sought new ways to work for African independence from imperial rule. Relocating to France, where Garan Kouyaté was an ally from his Comintern days, Padmore began to write a book: How Britain Rules Africa. With the help of former American heiress Nancy Cunard, he found a London agent and, eventually, a publisher (Wishart). It published the book in 1936, the year the publisher became Lawrence and Wishart, known to be sympathetic to communists. Publication of books by black men at that time was rare in the United Kingdom. A Swiss publisher distributed a German translation in Germany.Carol Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (2009), pp. 1–15.
In 1934, Padmore moved to London, where he became the centre of a community of writers dedicated to pan-Africanism and African independence. His boyhood friend C. L. R. James, also from Trinidad, was already there, writing and publishing. James had started International African Friends of Ethiopia in response to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. That organization developed into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), which became a centre for African and Caribbean intellectuals' anti-colonial activity. Padmore was chair of IASB, the Barbadian trade unionist Chris Braithwaite was its organising secretary, and James edited its periodical, International African Opinion. Ras Makonnen from British Guiana handled the business end.Polsgrove, Ending British Rule, pp. 25, 29–37. Other key members included Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya and Amy Ashwood Garvey.
As Carol Polsgrove has shown in Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause, Padmore and his allies in the 1930s and 1940s—among them C. L. R. James, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, the Gold Coast's Kwame Nkrumah and South Africa's Peter Abrahams—saw publishing as a strategy for political change. They published small periodicals, which were sometimes seized by authorities when they reached the colonies. They published articles in other people's periodicals, for instance, the Independent Labour Party's New Leader. They published pamphlets. They wrote letters to the editor; and, thanks to the support of publisher Fredric Warburg (of Secker & Warburg), they published books. Warburg brought out Padmore's Africa and World Peace (1937), as well as books by both Kenyatta and James.Polsgrove, Ending British Rule, pp. 23–42. In a foreword to Africa and World Peace, Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps wrote: "George Padmore has performed another great service of enlightenment in this book. The facts he discloses so ruthlessly are undoubtedly unpleasant facts, the story which he tells of the colonization of Africa is sordid in the extreme, but both the facts and the story are true. We have, so many of us, been brought up in the atmosphere of 'the white man's burden', and have had our minds clouded and confused by the continued propaganda for imperialism that we may be almost shocked by this bare and courageous exposure of the great myth of the civilizing mission of western democracies in Africa."Sir Stafford Cripps KC, MP, "Foreword", Africa and World Peace (1937), p. ix. The Biographical Note on the cover describes Padmore as European correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, Gold Coast Spectator, African Morning Post, Panama Tribune, Belize Independent and The Bantu World.
In 1941, Padmore argued that the British Empire should be transformed into "federated commonwealths based upon Socialist principles."
Before World War II, James left for the United States, where he met Kwame Nkrumah, a student from the Gold Coast who studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. James gave Nkrumah a letter of introduction to Padmore.Ken Lawrence, "Padmore and CLR James". When Nkrumah arrived in London in May 1945 intending to study law, Padmore met him at the station. It was the start of a long alliance. Padmore was then organizing the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress (designated the Fifth Pan-African Congress), attended not only by the inner circle of the IASB but also by W. E. B. Du Bois, the American organizer of earlier Pan-African conferences. The Manchester conference helped set the agenda for decolonisation in the post-war period.Polsgrove, Ending British Rule, pp. 45, 70, 75.