George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author.
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.
[2] Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, better known by his pseudonym George Padmore, was born on 28 June 1903 in Arouca District, Tacarigua,[3][4] Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies.
[5] His father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was a local schoolmaster who had married Anna Susanna Symister of Antigua, a naturalist.
[12] Following his presentation, Padmore was asked to stay on in Moscow to head the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern).
Even after he had renounced Communism in the mid-1930s, Padmore continued until his death in 1959 to cite the trial of Robinson's assailants as evidence that the USSR was the only country that had effectively eradicated racial discrimination.
--Meredith L. Roman, "Robert Robinson (1930s)", in Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian and Karen Racine (eds), The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500–2000, p. 142, Rowman & Littlefield (16 November 2009), ISBN 0742567303.
[15] 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.
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.
Relocating to France, where Garan Kouyaté was an ally from his Comintern days, Padmore began to write a book: How Britain Rules Africa.
Padmore was chair of IASB, the Barbadian trade unionist Chris Braithwaite was its organising secretary, and James edited its periodical, International African Opinion.
[21] 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.
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.
"[22] 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.
"[23] 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.
He and Dorothy Pizer, a white English writer and his domestic partner and co-worker, shared a flat that became a center for African nationalists.
Padmore maintained connections across the world, sending articles to international newspapers and keeping up a correspondence with American writers and activists W. E. B.
At Padmore's urging, Wright travelled to the Gold Coast in 1953 to explore the buildup to independence, and he wrote his book Black Power (1954).
[26] When Wright published Black Power in 1954, Padmore was finishing a book that he hoped would be both a history and blueprint for African independence: Pan-Africanism or Communism?
[28] Meanwhile, former Padmore ally Peter Abrahams published a roman à clef entitled A Wreath for Udomo (1956), which contained unflattering portrayals of the members of this London political community.
From the time of Nkrumah's return to the Gold Coast in 1947 to lead its independence movement, Padmore advised him in long detailed letters.
Peasants from far-flung regions who, one might think, had never even heard his name, managed to find their way to Accra to pay a final tribute to the West Indian who spent his life in their service.