Abstract
If the global confrontation with fascism in 1939 and the electoral victory of European labour parties in 1945 shifted Padmore’s political strategy, then it also transformed him professionally. From a truculent and impoverished agitator in the 1930s who spent his days researching Africa in the chilling recesses of the British Museum, his evenings deliberating with C.L.R. James and Jomo Kenyatta, and his weekends organizing protest rallies, hounding Marcus Garvey at Hyde Park Corner, or heckling the well-meaning condescension of liberals assembled for the latest Fabian Colonial Bureau conference, the young and fiery organizer secured a day job — George Padmore became a journalist. This is not to say that Padmore did not continue in his relentless organizing or his passion for debating the latest political events. Nor that he undertook journalism as an end in itself or as a career — journalism was always a medium for Padmore’s political commitments. But it was during the war that this crucial aspect of Padmore’s praxis came to the fore in ways which were only embryonic before, and after the war he enlarged this medium into a major front on which he worked.
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Notes
To support this claim, Hooker argued that ‘only on one occasion did an article of his scoop the press.’ See James Hooker, Black Revolutionary (London: Pall Mall Press, 1967), p 84. More recent assessments praise Padmore’s ‘wit and brilliance as a journalist’, and the importance of his journalism both to his livelihood and to his overall work. See S. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p 102; C. Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2009), p 58.
P. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) , p 8.
K. Singh, Race and Class Struggles in a Colonial State (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1994), p 17. Padmore’s work for the paper is confirmed in a clipping of the Obituary for the newspapers editor, Edward J. Partridge, no date, no paper. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, George Padmore Collection, vol. 1.
F. Smith, Creole Recitations (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002), pp. 27, 29.
L. Putnam, ‘Nothing Matters but Color’, in From Toussaint to Tupac, eds West et al. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p 121.
L. Putnam, ‘Provincializing Harlem: The “Negro Metropolis” as Northern Frontier of an Interconnected Greater Caribbean’, Modernism/Modernity 20, no. 3 (2013), pp. 469–484.
For more on Briggs’s political divorce from Amsterdam News and his decision to found his own radical paper, see Solomon, The Cry Was Unity (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 7–25; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, p 49.
M. Solomon, Cry Was Unity (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1998) , pp. 7–25; C. McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Lee Furman, 1937).
C. Polsgrove, ‘George Padmore’s Use of Periodicals to Build a Movement’, in George Padmore, eds Baptiste and Lewis (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2009), 97–104.
For how Padmore’s journalism served to analyse the early Cold War in the Caribbean, see G. Horne, Cold War in a Hot Zone (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007).
George Padmore, ‘West Indians Asked to Beware of Commission: No Afro- Indians Appointed’, The People, 3 September 1938. Harvey Neptune argues that by the mid-1930s The People was a ‘race-conscious’ newspaper that acted as the main ‘voice of proletarian advocacy’ in Trinidad. H. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p 39.
George Padmore, ‘Awakened Negro Youth’, Negro Champion, 1928.
Through the pages of Labour Monthly, Dutt led the British Communist Party’s thinking on imperialism. See John Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993).
R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, ‘The Anti-Imperialist People’s Front in India’, Labour Monthly 18, no. 3 (March 1936).
However, Small reprinted parts of the Negro Worker in his paper and his affiliation with the communist movement was of ongoing interest to the colonial administration. See J. Ayodele Langley, ‘The Gambia Section of the National Congress of British West Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 39, no. 4 (October 1969), 384–385. For Padmore’s letter, see ‘Some Observations on Gambia’ by Malcolm Nurse, extract from The Gambia Outlook and Senegambian Reporter 6, no. 17, 29 December 1931. RGASPI 534/7/74, item 30.
Lisanne Radice, Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists (London: Macmillan, 1984), p 201.
Christopher Bayly, Recovering Liberties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p 105. I am grateful to Richard Drayton for suggesting this comparison.
George Cotkin, ‘Illuminating Evil: Hannah Arendt and Moral History’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (November 2007), pp. 463–490.
For an analysis of Padmore’s use of colonial sources as a tool for claiming ‘objectivity’ and as a means of more convincingly condemning colonial rule, see T. Martin, ‘George Padmore as a Prototype of the Black Historian in the Age of Militancy’, Pan African Journal IV, no. 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 161–162.
J. Teelucksingh, ‘The Immortal Batsman’, in George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary, eds Baptiste and Lewis (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2009), p 19.
C. Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Padmore, ‘West Indian Sugar Battle Continues’, The Ashanti Pioneer, 25 August 1949.
Padmore, ‘English Blacks Plead for New Social Regime’, Chicago Defender, 27 August 1938.
Padmore, ‘African Colonials Cost Britain Penny Each’, Chicago Defender, 5 August 1944.
Padmore, ‘Lord Olivier Denounces British Colonial System’, Chicago Defender, 25 June 1938.
J. Flint, ‘Managing Nationalism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27, no. 2 (1999), p 146. Flint states circulation figures for the African Morning Post in 1936 of 10,000 a day.
Idemili, ‘What the West African Pilot Did’, Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 3 (1978), p 86.
For a useful Marxist history of Public Opinion, the People’s National Party, and the Jamaican labour rebellions, see Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellions of 1938 and its Aftermath (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).
Padmore, ‘African Rail Strike, Farm Revolt Plague British’, WAP, 22 December 1945; Padmore, ‘South Rhodesian Railwaymen Now Strike and Sympathising African Miners Join’, WAP, 30 November 1945; Padmore, ‘Excellent Discipline of the Rhodesian Strikers Defeats Aim of Government’, WAP, 1 December 1945.
Padmore, ‘Africans in Belgian Congo Strike for Higher Wages and Better Conditions’, WAP, 28 December 1945.
Padmore, ‘African Receives a Reward of 5 Pounds for Finding World’s Largest Diamond’, WAP, 2 June 1945.
Padmore, ‘Biggest Diamond Found in Africa - Goes to British’, Chicago Defender, 4 December 1943.
Padmore, ‘British White Paper Reveals Huge Profits Made on West African Cocoa and New Plans for Control after the War’, WAP, 31 October 1944.
Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 3 April 1948.
Padmore, ‘European Imperialists Ponder!’ Ashanti Pioneer, 16 July 1947.
Quoted in Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 17 January 1948.
Quoted in Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 14 February 1948.
Padmore, ‘Dollar Investment in Colonies to Overcome Difficulties Will Be Encouraged to Operate through Colonial Office Development Corporation’, Ashanti Pioneer, 25 October 1949.
Padmore, ‘“White Supremacy” in all Africa?’, Ashanti Pioneer, 6 October 1949.
Padmore, ‘Post for Hastie Alarms British’, Chicago Defender, 23 March 1946.
Padmore, ‘Colonies and Sterling Devaluation’, Ashanti Pioneer, 10 October 1949.
Padmore, ‘US British Partnership in Colonies Postwar Aim’, Chicago Defender, 25 September 1943; ‘Britain May Invite US to Join in Colony Rule’, Chicago Defender, 9 January 1943.
Padmore, ‘US Asked to Replace British Role in Africa’, Chicago Defender, 11 December 1948.
Padmore, ‘How US Rules Its Colonial Empire’, Ashanti Pioneer, 30 August 1949.
Padmore, ‘Post for Hastie Alarms British’, Chicago Defender, 23 March 1948.
O.A. Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapters 1 and 2.
Padmore, ‘America Backs Russia against UK’, Ashanti Pioneer, 18 November 1948.
Padmore, ‘Imperialism Groomed for Comeback at Peace Table’, Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, 18 September 1943.
Padmore, ‘Africa Holds Key to Atomic Future’, Chicago Defender, 8 September 1945; ‘World View’ Chicago Defender, 7 August 1948.
Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 19 July 1947; ‘May Turn Africa into Arsenal against Reds’, Chicago Defender, 1 January 1949.
Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 1 March 1947.
Padmore, ‘Whither Colonial Development?’, Ashanti Pioneer, 27 February 1948; ‘Africa May Have Big Negro Army’, Ashanti Pioneer, 28 November 1949.
Padmore, ‘Malan Disarm Order Delays Defense Plan’, Chicago Defender, 18 December 1948.
Padmore, ‘Ghetto Law for South African Natives’, Chicago Defender, 7 January 1939.
Our London Correspondent, ‘Black Troops to be Recruited in British Colonies for Service in France’, Vanguard, 29 June 1940.
Padmore, ‘Black and White’, Vanguard, 21 April 1945.
Padmore ‘Famine Grows in South Africa’, Chicago Defender, 23 February 1946. For a historical critique of Jan Smuts at the UN and of Du Bois’s contemporary criticism, see M. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 14–20; pp. 28–64.
Padmore, ‘General Smuts Vows Purge as Starving Africa Rebels’, Chicago Defender, 19 January 1946.
Padmore, ‘British Empire Faces Big Crisis’, Ashanti Pioneer, 29 June 1948.
Carol Anderson, ‘International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP’s Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa’s Liberation, 1946–1951’, Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 297–298; p 317.
Padmore, ‘World View’, Chicago Defender, 15 November 1947.
Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, eds S. Marks and S. Trapido (London: Longman Group, 1987), p 20.
Padmore, ‘White Supremacy in All Africa?’, Ashanti Pioneer, 6 October 1949.
R. Irwin, Gordian Knot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p 6; p 10.
Leah Rosenburg, ‘The Audacity of Faith: Creole Recitations Explained’, Small Axe 15, no. 2 (July 2011), p 168.
Padmore, ‘Freedom of Colonial Press Is Withdrawn’, Chicago Defender, 15 January 1949.
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James, L. (2015). Writing Anti-imperial Solidarity from London. In: George Padmore and Decolonization from Below. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352026_5
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