George Padmore

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse

University College Hospital, London

1932, 1935–57

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, known as George Padmore, was born into an emerging Black middle-class family in Trinidad in 1902. In 1924 he married Julia Semper and left for further education in the United States later that year. At first he studied at Fisk University, then moved on to New York University and later to Howard University, Washington, DC in 1927. There he joined the Communist Party and adopted the name George Padmore.

In 1929 Padmore travelled to Moscow, where he helped to organize the first International Conference of Negro Workers (1930). After Moscow, he briefly went to Vienna, Austria, where he met Rajani Palme Dutt. From 1931 he was based in Hamburg, Germany, where he edited the Negro Worker. He briefly visited London in 1932. In 1934 he asked W. E. B. Du Bois for help with organizing unity among people of African descent. After falling out with the Comintern, he relocated to London in 1935, where he became involved with, but never a member of, the Independent Labour Party, collaborating with Fenner Brockway and Reginald Reynolds. In 1935 he also became close friends with T. Subasinghe, who would later become Ambassador of Ceylon in Russia. Padmore conducted political study classes for some colonial students, including Subasinghe. According to Subasinghe, Padmore went through a difficult time from 1935 to 1945.

In 1936 Padmore met K. D. Kumria, founder of Swaraj House in Percy Street, at an Indian National Congress rally, and through Kumria came into contact with many members of the Indian National Congress in London. The ties between the two led to Swaraj House often becoming a venue for protest meetings of African groups. Padmore also became a close friend of Krishna Menon, who did not get along with Kumria.  At a meeting held at Swaraj House in 1944 to celebrate Nehru's 55th birthday, Padmore gave a speech in praise of Nehru's international outlook. In a letter to the editor of Socialist Leader, 28 February 1948, Padmore, Douglas Rogers of the British Centre for Colonial Freedom and Kundan Lal Jalie of Swaraj House announced that Swaraj House would henceforth be a general anti-colonial meeting place open to all groups. Apparently, Padmore held Indian national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subash Chandra Bose in high regard but because of his Marxist leanings he also pointed out the limitations of such leaders because of their bourgeois backgrounds.

In 1937 Padmore founded the International African Service Bureau, and in late 1944 Padmore and others formed the Pan-African Federation, which was responsible for organizing the Pan-African Congress in October 1945 in Manchester. The conference was attended by Padmore, Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and South Asians such as Surat Alley, N. Gangulee and T. Subasinghe. In 1946 Padmore and other well-known Pan-Africanists, such as Jomo Kenyatta and W. E. B. Du Bois, joined Krishna Menon's protest against the use of colonial troops in Indo-China and Burma.

In 1956 he published Pan-Africanism or Communism? in which he expressed gratitude to those who had supported his cause against racism and colonialism. Among them were Leonard Woolf and Shapurji Saklatvala, about whom he said: 'He was the one Indian who had no time for opportunistic trimmers and sycophants. The most independent-minded Communist ever. A Titoist before Tito!' (p. 328). The same year, he moved to the newly independent Ghana, where he became Kwame Nkrumah's personal advisor on African affairs. In Ghana, his health declined and in September 1959, on a medical visit to London, he died at University College Hospital in London.