These events transformed generations of people across a spectrum of economic, social, and political positions and, in particular, forced a much broader public engagement with contentious questions of race and class in international politics. In George Padmore’s case, these lived experiences were interpreted through the combination of a particular upbringing and a deeply political and committed personality. Indeed his one-time friend, the South African novelist Peter Abrahams, described Padmore thus: ‘As a Negro he is the most completely political I have ever met. … I know George pretty well and yet if I were to try, mentally, to take George out of his political setting and see him as a person divorced from all political interests, I honestly don’t know what kind of a person he would be.’² This description of Padmore as ‘completely political’ is one of the most pertinent reflections about Padmore’s personality. His commitment to political issues was almost absolute, and the man who is reflected, even in personal communication, is one who was constantly engaged with the issues of the time. To understand why Padmore made the commitments he did, why he responded to world events in the manner that he did, and why he became the kind of teacher for young nationalists that he did, Padmore’s genuine passion for politics is paramount.

This chapter situates George Padmore in the world that birthed his politics. During his lifetime, there was a tendency for colonial authorities to portray Padmore as a doctrinaire figure – a man who held only one position (a position which they rightly understood was in essence always against their own position of power) and who pressed that position upon the susceptible minds of young colonial nationalists. A rigid interpretation of Padmore and his politics has until recently also persisted in the few studies of Padmore that do exist. These have largely been unable to reconcile Padmore’s ‘communist’ and ‘pan-Africanist’ titles, leaving little room for ambiguity, flexibility, or adaptability in his thinking. In these accounts, Padmore either ‘left behind’ his earlier, ‘youthful’ communist flirtation for his true position as a pan-Africanist, or he remained a committed Marxist who for decades ‘continued to think in terms of Comintern categories’.³

More recently, scholars have recognized how both communist and black liberationist ideas were fitted together by Padmore and his colleagues in the 1930s while they were with the Comintern. Both Susan Pennybacker and Brent Edwards have analysed Padmore’s years with the Comintern in two critical ways: as a collaborative moment where networks were built and as the base through which Padmore’s evolution toward Pan-Africanism could take place.⁴ Finally, there are those who more forcefully argue that the ideas of people like Padmore were not on a dual track but, rather, worked together as one single explanation of a global imperialist system in which black workers could play a central, not a secondary or separate, role in ending.⁵ Indeed Anthony Bogues argues that Padmore was involved ‘in anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles from the stance of an understanding of the centrality to global revolution of the black struggle’.⁶

The black and white image of Padmore was of course also fostered by the vehement tone of his writing and the ways in which he chose to promote or omit certain issues at particular times. The seemingly conflicting characteristics of a person defined by abundant confidence and determination, as well as ideological experimentation and movement, came together to form a multi-faceted and sometimes contradictory global citizen: one who poked at boundaries and, with resolve, also often sought to knock them down. What, then, were the main tenets of his thinking before 1939 and where can we locate the influences that shaped that thinking? The first part of this question will be explained in the next chapter. The answer to the second part of this question resides in multiple sites: on the streets of Port of Spain, Harlem, Moscow, Hamburg and London, and in the historical moment each space represented for political thought.

Into this diverse and migratory terrain of peoples, Malcolm Evan Meredith Nurse was born on 28 June 1903.⁹ He changed his name from Malcolm Nurse to George Padmore in the late 1920s in order to avoid trouble after he joined the Communist Party in the United States. His mother came from a prominent black family who held leadership roles in the village of Arima, a major hub for the cocoa industry. Run at the local level by the black middle class, Arima’s political life afforded a rather unusual position of power for black men since as town officials they were included in official functions at Government House.¹⁰ His father, the son of a Barbadian slave, was headmaster of the local school when Padmore was born. However James Hubert Alphonso Nurse quickly distinguished himself in the field of agriculture and, joining the civil service, held a position for a time as Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Gardens.¹¹ He was also a member of one of the first branches of Henry Sylvester Williams’s Pan-African Congress.¹²

From an early age, then, Padmore was connected to what his boyhood friend C.L.R. James has enumerated as a group of ‘remarkable West Indian men’, including Toussaint L’Ouverture and Sylvester Williams, Aimé Césaire, René Maran, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and Stokely Carmichael.¹³ While much of the analysis below integrates debates about features of the Caribbean and of the notion of a West Indian intellectual tradition, it should be noted that most of the examples provided here are from Trinidad. This is done necessarily to focus on Padmore, and hopefully does not negate the rich and varied experiences between the diverse islands we call the Caribbean.

James’s repeated inclusion of Padmore within a Caribbean male tradition of leadership is not altogether unwarranted. Henry Sylvester Williams, who organized the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, was born over a quarter century before Padmore in the same tiny village of Arouca, to Barbadian immigrant parents.¹⁴ James also traced part of his ancestry from Barbados, and both he, Padmore, and Eric Williams, the esteemed academic and first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, were all products of the same period in Trinidadian history. Claude McKay, whose verse so stirred the Harlem Renaissance, trod the path from the West Indies, to the United States, to the Soviet Union, to Africa, which Padmore would follow a decade later. Fanon and Padmore both came to greatest prominence in Africa in the 1950s, as they struggled to forge a path for African revolutionaries outside the rigid boundaries of the Cold War. Both spent their last years in Africa and died, at a relatively young age, two years apart. All of these men traversed the globe and became international figures. Finally, the most popular of these men was undoubtedly Padmore’s sometime nemesis, Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s emphasis on black business and self-help within capitalism’s framework was anathema to black Marxists like Padmore; in addition to this the elevation of Garvey’s own personality meant that in 1931 Padmore denounced Garvey’s ‘showmanship’, describing him as an ‘international clown’ and ‘demagogue’ who exploited black workers’ racial consciousness for his own economic ends.¹⁵ Yet while Padmore’s politics and style certainly was not moulded in the same pageantry as Garvey, the combative vein of Garvey’s rhetorical performance, known so well in the West Indies, gives some context to Padmore’s own aggressive rhetorical style.¹⁶

The border crossings of James’s ‘remarkable men’ give some evidence that they were shaped by the idea of movement and the ability to cross national boundaries. The Barbadian ancestry of James, Padmore and Sylvester Williams testifies to the remarkable internal migration within the West Indies. The Port of Spain of Padmore’s youth, Lara Putnam has recently emphasized, was an ‘intra-Caribbean immigrant stronghold’, a place full of workers receiving letters from relatives in Grenada or Barbados and labourers returning from the Canal Zone of Panama, the United Fruit Company plantations of Costa Rica, or the goldfields of Venezuela.¹⁷ This circum-Caribbean migration was an important feature of West Indian life, but it was also a feature of British imperialism in general – a result of the ‘transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism’.¹⁸ The diverse ethnic groups that arrived on these islands are only one example of this. The network of colonial administrators who traversed the empire and thus connected the policies and practices carried out in disparate colonies became a consistent thread in Padmore’s journalism in the late 1930s and 1940s.¹⁹ Colonialism’s border crossing also facilitated not only physical movement but psychological leaps, since colonialism also created for the colonized ‘particular perceptions of their place in the world and of how they should engage with the world beyond their physical location’.²⁰

What is intriguing about studying the work of these men is the way these transnational connections embedded in empire produced physical and emotional dislocation that expressed itself in such variegated forms of thought and action. For Michelle Ann Stephens, the discourses of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C.L.R. James commonly expressed the history of movement experienced by the black diaspora, creating global stories of their race that found expression through varied political forms and political bodies. For Stephens, by studying the work of these men, the ‘inescapable hybridity of imperial history is revealed.’²¹ Thus the common experiences of these West Indian men has also been recognized as forged within difference – the differences between French and British colonial rule, of skin tone, and of political orientation – which were central to the invention of what Brent Edwards influentially called a ‘black international’.

These varied political forms and political bodies are crucial to a reading of Padmore – or indeed any of these men – as coming from a West Indian intellectual tradition. But while Stevens’ emphasis on hybridity rightly highlights the diversity of the colonial experience, the use of the term also implies that this diversity could be moulded into one form. The fact that their international outlooks also held within them distinctive class and racial tensions meant that the political positions and alliances of these men varied in several ways.

First and foremost, the circumstances of these men’s education reproduced particular colonial divisions of both race and class. While education beyond a primary level was a key means of mobility for the ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ middle class in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Trinidad, it remained the preserve of a select few. Not only were the majority of the island’s children of African descent excluded, but the proportion of children of Indian descent who were denied an education was significantly greater.²² When Indian children (who were usually found in rural areas and on plantations) did receive an education, it was intentionally directed towards agriculture in order to ensure they did not cultivate a desire to leave the plantation. Indeed, the education system in Trinidad was dictated by discrete divisions, manipulated by the colonial government in order to provide a modicum of education while maintaining the racial and social status quo.²³

The pride of race in colonial Trinidad, and in particular the pride of a black middle class, held connotations specific to an island in which status was often closely linked to race, and distinctions of skin tone and origin often corresponded to a person’s status (i.e. the ‘coloured’ or ‘mixed’ population typically held a higher social position). As we shall see, Padmore usually rejected these differences and, instead, built alliances with interested partners no matter how light or dark their skin. He consistently condemned divisions among black peoples that he believed were fostered by colonial administrators, and championed alliances between nationalists from Africa, its diaspora, and Asia.

With its discrete divisions of both race and class, education (beyond literacy) in th...