George Padmore

George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author.

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, better known by his pseudonym George Padmore, was born on 28 June 1903 in Arouca District, Tacarigua, 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.

His father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was a local schoolmaster who had married Anna Susanna Symister of Antigua, a naturalist.

Nurse attended Tranquillity School in Port of Spain, before going to St Mary's College for two years (1914 and 1915).

He transferred to the Pamphylian High School, graduating from there in 1918.

After that he worked for several years as a reporter with the Trinidad Publishing Company.

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.

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, 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).

According to Nurse's instruction, she was named in honour of the African nationalist Edward Blyden of Liberia.

Nurse subsequently registered at New York University but soon transferred to Howard University.

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).

Padmore officially joined the Communist Party in 1927 (when he was in Washington, DC) and was active in its mass organization targeted to black Americans, the American Negro Labor Congress.

In March 1929 he was a fraternal (non-voting) delegate to the 6th National Convention of the CPUSA, held in New York City.

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.

He was also used periodically as a courier of funds from Moscow to various foreign Communist Parties.

He also worked for the party in Germany but left after the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

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.

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.

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.

In 1935, the USSR made a decisive shift in foreign policy: Britain and France, colonial powers with colonies in Africa, were classified as "democratic-imperialisms"—a lower priority than the category of "fascist-imperialist" powers, in which Japan and Germany fell.

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.

Padmore lived for a time in France, before settling in London.

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.