The Negro Worker was the newspaper of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. It was called The International Negro Workers' Review, when launched in 1928, but the name was changed in March 1931. It ceased publication in 1937. [1]
It was edited first by George Padmore until 1931 and then by James W. Ford.
The Negro Worker was the great dissemination instrument of the Comintern, which allowed black people and allies to "have updated information on the struggles that were being waged around the world and the necessary (communist) political orientation for radical transformations, taking as reference to the feat of Soviet Russia". [2] Like Marcus Garvey's Negro World, it was banned for subversion in Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada and Saint Vincent, although this did not prevent the working class (mostly from the oil companies) from circulating the publication clandestinely. [3]
The Pan-African Congress (PAC) is a regular series of meetings which first took place on the back of the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900.
George Padmore, born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left his native Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party.
The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.
The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s.
John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher, founder in 1966 of New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publishing company in Britain, and subsequently Chairman of the George Padmore Institute. He was originally from Trinidad and Tobago but was involved in the struggle for political independence and cultural and social change in the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s and later in Britain, the rest of Europe and the Third World.
Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
James W. “Jim” Ford was an activist, a politician, and the vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in the years 1932, 1936, and 1940. Ford was born in Alabama and later worked as a party organizer for the CPUSA in New York City. He was also the first African American to run on a U.S. presidential ticket (1932) in the 20th century.
Afro-Caribbean leftism refers to left-wing political currents that have developed among various African-Caribbean communities in the Caribbean, the United States of America, France, Great Britain, or anywhere else they have chosen to settle.
Otto Eduard Gerardus Majella Huiswoud was a Surinamese political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud served briefly as the Communist Party's representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922 and was a leading black Comintern functionary during the decade of the 1920s.
Chris Braithwaite, also known as Chris Jones, was a black Barbadian who was leader of the Colonial Seamen's Association in the 1930s.
The George Padmore Institute (GPI), founded in 1991 in Stroud Green Road, North London, by John La Rose (1927–2006) and a group of political and cultural activists connected to New Beacon Books, is an archive, library, educational resource and research centre that houses "materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in Britain and continental Europe". The institute also hosts talks and readings, as well as other educational and cultural activities.
Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, née Nunez, was a Trinidadian-born theatrical and literary agent, actress and cultural activist, who was a pioneering campaigner for the recognition and promotion of African Caribbean arts. In the UK, in the 1950s, she was the first agent to represent black and other minority ethnic actors, writers and film-makers, and during the early 1960s was instrumental in setting up one of Britain's first black theatre companies, the Negro Theatre Workshop. In the words of John La Rose, who delivered a eulogy at her funeral on 26 February 2005: "Pearl Connor-Mogotsi was pivotal in the effort to remake the landscape for innovation and for the inclusion of African, Caribbean and Asian artists in shaping a new vision of consciousness for art and society."
The International Labor Defense (ILD) (1925–1947) was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation. In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA. It intended to expand its appeal, especially to African Americans in the South. In several prominent cases in which blacks had been sentenced to death in the South, the CRC campaigned on behalf of black defendants. It had some conflict with former allies, such as the NAACP, and became increasingly isolated. Because of federal government pressure against organizations it considered subversive, such as the CRC, it became less useful in representing defendants in criminal justice cases. The CRC was dissolved in 1956. At the same time, in this period, black leaders were expanding the activities and reach of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
The Communist League of America (Opposition) was founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern late in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism. The CLA(O) was the United States section of Leon Trotsky's International Left Opposition and initially positioned itself as not a rival party to the CPUSA but as a faction of it and the Comintern. The group was terminated in 1934 when it merged with the American Workers Party headed by A. J. Muste to establish the Workers Party of the United States.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, often referred to as The Black Book Fair, was inaugurated in London, England, in April 1982 and continued until 1995, bringing together a number of Black publishers, intellectuals and educationalists. It was held on 12 occasions: annually from 1982 to 1991, and then biennially, in 1993 and 1995. The first three Book Fairs took place in different areas of London — Islington, Lambeth and Acton — representing the respective bases of the three founding organisers: New Beacon Books, Race Today Publications and Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications. Additionally, from 1985, there were associated book fairs held elsewhere in England, in Manchester and Bradford (1985–93), Leeds, and in 1993 and 1995 in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1987 and 1988, a sister event — the Caribbean Peoples International Bookfair and Bookfair Festival — took place in Trinidad, organised by the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union there.
The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a section of the Profintern that existed during the late 1920s and 1930s and acted as a radical transnational platform for black workers in Africa and the Atlantic World.
Jessica Elleisse Huntley was a Guyanese-British political reformer and prominent race equality campaigner. She was a publisher of black and Asian literature, and a women's and community rights activist. She is notable as the founder in 1969 of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications in London.
Sandalio Junco Camellón (1894-1942) was a Cuban Afro-Latino labor figure and communist radical. Having started out as a trade unionist, Junco rose through anarcho-syndicalist organizations to fight for the interests of workers throughout Cuba. After going into exile following arrest, Junco travelled from Mexico to South America to the Soviet Union, developing and advocating his views in the interest of workers and people of color. Upon his return to Cuba, his involvement and eventual work against the Stalinist- aligned Cuban Communist Party established him as the "father of Cuban Trotskyism." Junco was assassinated on May 8, 1942, by members of the Communist party.
The Ligue de défense de la race nègre was an originally French civil rights organization of Black persons. It was founded in 1927 out of a predecessor organization whose roots went back to 1924. Its headquarters were in Paris, but in 1937 the French organization was disbanded. Under the name Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse, there was a German section in Berlin from 1929 to 1935.
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