George Padmore

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse was born in Arouca, Trinidad, on the twenty-eighth of June 1903. He took the pen-name George Padmore in the early 1930s as he entered the international communist movement. He served as head of the Communist International's Negro Bureau in the 1930s, edited its Black-worker journals, and organized Black labor across the Atlantic on the Comintern's behalf.

He broke with Moscow in 1934, when the Comintern under Stalin abandoned anti-colonial work in favor of Popular Front politics with the British Labour Party. The split made him the most important non-aligned Black Marxist of the next quarter-century — and one of the very few who had run an actual political bureaucracy. He moved to London and became the principal organizer of the Pan-African movement in Britain.

He convened, with W. E. B. Du Bois, the Fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in October 1945 — the congress attended by Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, and the political generation that would lead African independence within the next decade and a half. He served as Nkrumah's adviser on African affairs from 1957 to his death, helping to design the founding architecture of independent Ghana.

His major books — Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956) and How Britain Rules Africa (1936) — established the analytic framework within which African statesmen of the independence generation worked.

He died in London on the twenty-third of September 1959, age fifty-six. His ashes were placed in the Christianborg Castle in Accra by Kwame Nkrumah personally.

He is honored here as the organizer who designed the political framework of African independence.