George Padmore

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse was born on the twenty-eighth of June 1903 in Arouca, Tacarigua, Trinidad, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of age in the British West Indies, worked as a young reporter in Port of Spain, and in 1924 sailed for the United States to study. There, drawn to the cause of the world's oppressed, he joined the Communist movement and took the pen-name George Padmore, the name by which history would honor him.

He rose swiftly in the international movement, heading the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions in Moscow and serving as secretary of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, whose journal, The Negro Worker, he edited from Hamburg. But when the movement subordinated African liberation to other interests, he broke with it; in February 1934 he was formally expelled. From that hour he devoted himself wholly to the freedom of Africa and its scattered children.

Settling in London, Padmore became the tireless organizer and thinker of the Pan-African cause. In October 1945 he was a principal convenor of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, a gathering that drew Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and a rising generation of leaders, and that set the agenda for African decolonization. His books and journalism armed a movement with argument and vision.

When Nkrumah led the Gold Coast toward independence, Padmore stood at his side, advising him through the years surrounding Ghana's freedom in 1957 and serving as his adviser on African affairs. He died in London on the twenty-third of September 1959, and his ashes were laid to rest in Ghana, the free nation he had helped to birth. May the father of practical Pan-Africanism be forever honored among the ancestors.