George Padmore

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George Padmore (born July 28, 1902 as Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Tacarigua , Trinidad , † September 23, 1959 in London ) was a West Indian publicist , communist politician and a pioneer of Pan-Africanism .

Life

Malcolm Ivan Nurse's father, Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was a teacher and agricultural adviser to the British colonial government of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. The boy attended elementary school in Port of Spain , then from 1915 to 1916 St. Mary's Roman Catholic College and the private Pamphylion High School. He was an apprentice to a pharmacist and then a journalist with the Trinidad Guardian . CLR James was a childhood friend. Nurse married Julia Semper, with whom he had a daughter. He went to the United States in 1924 to study medicine at Fisk University in Nashville ; his daughter Blyden stayed behind in Trinidad. In 1927, he enrolled at New York University for law without taking courses.

In 1928 he joined the Communist Party and took the name of a cousin, George Padmore. The party sent him to the Howard Law School in Washington . Padmore took part in the second congress of the League against Imperialism in Frankfurt for his party . At the end of 1929 he traveled to Moscow, where he was soon appointed head of the newly formed Negro Bureau of the Communist International of Labor Unions . He organized the first International Conference of Negro Workers of the League Against Imperialism on 7/8. July 1930 in Hamburg. Padmore had left Moscow that year and was now operating from Vienna and Hamburg. In 1930 he opened a "Negro office" in Hamburg and published the monthly magazine The Negro Worker until 1933 . In 1933 he was briefly imprisoned and then expelled from Germany.

Moscow carried out its abrupt U-turn (popular front policy) also in its anti-imperialism. It joined the League of Nations in 1934 and did not want to annoy the western colonial powers unnecessarily. The main office of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers in Hamburg ( port office ), established in 1928, was closed by the Nazis in April 1933. His secretary Padmore was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party on February 23, 1934. During this time he lived in Paris and London, where he moved in early 1934. Padmore worked on Nancy Cunard's 1934 Negro Anthology. He renewed his friendship with the Trotskyist CLR James.

In 1945 Padmore was involved in the organization of the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester . In the same year he met Kwame Nkrumah in London , with whom he had a fruitful collaboration. Padmore spent the last two years of his life with his girlfriend Dorothy Pizer in Ghana, which had become independent in 1957, as adviser to President Kwame Nkrumah. He died in London of internal bleeding from liver failure.

plant

  • The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. RILU [Red International of Labor Unions] Magazine for the International Trade Unions Committee of Negro Workers , London 1931.
  • How Britain Rules Africa. Wishart, London 1936.
  • Africa under the yoke of the whites. Red apple, 1936.
  • Africa and World Peace. Secker & Warburg, London 1937. Foreword: Stafford Cripps .
  • with Nancy Cunard: White Man's Duty. 1942.
  • with Dorothy Pizer: How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire. Dennis Dobson, London 1946.
  • Africa: Britain's Third Empire. 1949.
  • The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. 1953.
  • Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. Dennis Dobson, London 1956. Introduction by Richard Wright .

literature

  • James R. Hooker: Black Revolutionary: George Padmore's Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. Pall Mall, London 1967.
  • Imanuel Geiss : Pan-Africanism: To the history of decolonization. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1968.
  • Christoph Marx : History of Africa. From 1800 to the present. Schöningh / UTB, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71748-0 .
  • Winfried Speitkamp : Small history of Africa. Reclam, Stuttgart 2007.
  • Fitzroy Baptiste and Robert Lewis (Eds.): George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary . Ian Randle, Kingston, Jamaica 2009. An article by Hakim Adi : George Padmore and the 1945 Manchester Pn-African Congress .
  • Carol Polsgrove: Ending British rule in Africa. Writers in a common cause . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2012, ISBN 978-0-7190-8901-5 .
  • Holger Weiss: Framing a Radical African Atlantic. African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers . Brill, Leiden / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-90-04261631 . In Part 3 (headed "George") on George Padmore, with chapters VII ( The ITUCNW in the RILU- and CI-apparatus, 1930-1933 ) and VIII ( The Radical African Atlantic, 1930-1933: Writing Class, Thinking Race ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In other sources, 1903 is given as the year of birth.
  2. ^ Andreas Eckert : A full-time revolver in the negro office. In the period between the world wars, Germany was a center of the struggle against colonialism. About a forgotten chapter in the history of rebellion in modern Africa . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 1, 2014, p. N3.
  3. ↑ Carol Polsgrove: Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause . Manchester University Press, Manchester 2009, ISBN 978-0-7190-7767-8 , pp. 162 .
personal data
SURNAME Padmore, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nurse, Malcolm Ivan Meredith (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION African publicist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Tacarigua , Trinidad
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1959
Place of death London