Last July was celebrated in England the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the ship Empire Windrush in London in 1948, bringing the first modern batch of West Indian migrants to the UK.
But there were black people in Britain long before 1948, indeed centuries before, and especially in their numbers from the 1930s, men such as Trinidadians CLR James who arrived there in 1932 and his friend George Padmore who arrived two years after and to whom tribute was paid earlier this month by the Windrush Foundation and the London Borough of Camden where he lived.
"George Padmore in my view is one of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century," said James at a lecture in 1976. "He earned for himself the title of 'Father of African emancipation'."
James was born in 1901, Padmore 1902, both the sons of brilliant teachers, and both grew up in Tunapuna.
Tunapuna / Arouca, where historically there were many independent black planters, has long produced independent thinkers such as Henry Sylvester Williams, the Trinidadian lawyer who founded the first Pan African Congress in London in 1900. Today, both Dean Knolly Clarke and Lloyd Best are the inheritors of that tradition.
Padmore's original name was Malcolm Ivan Meridith Nurse, and according to James, "he and I were boys together and his father and my father were good friends…I knew Malcolm's sister and the two families used to meet and talk and he (Padmore's father) and my father would go to the Savannah to watch the cricket."
Padmore's father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was already a remarkable man - well read, deeply concerned with the plight of black people, he abandoned Christianity in favour of Islam when such a thing was unknown.
Padmore went to St Mary's, James to QRC. The first became a journalist, the second a teacher. "I was reading European literature and history, and George reading chiefly Du Bois, Garvey and the others," recalled James.
In 1924 Padmore left to study medicine in the US but shifted to law. Instead he quickly rose as a powerful public speaker, joined the Communist party and adopted the name George Padmore. In 1929 he dropped out of university to migrate to the Soviet Union where he became a senior member of the Communist party in charge of mobilizing black workers worldwide.
James, who never went to university, migrated in 1932 to England where, two years later, he reunited with his childhood friend.
"When I was in England, one day I heard that the great George Padmore, the great Communist, was coming to speak in Gray's Inn Road," recalled James, then an unknown figure in the landscape. "I had heard a lot about George Padmore, the great man from Moscow who was organizing black people all over the world, so I said I would go…I went to the meeting and there were about 50 or 60 people, half of them white, and suddenly, after five minutes, there walked in the great George Padmore. Who was he but my friend Malcolm Nurse?"
The English socialist CA Smith described that meeting to Padmore's biographer James Hooker, recalling decades after, "two Negroes laughing uproariously". Hooker adds: "They turned out to be Padmore and James trading stories illustrative of the Comintern (Communist International) zigzags."
For all his laughter, however, Padmore left the communist party that year because he couldn't bear the zigzags, especially the order that the African affiliates cease to criticize British colonialism. "This," wrote Padmore, "I considered to be a betrayal of the fundamental interests of my people."
Along with a few other black people such as Amy Garvey - Marcus's former wife - they started the International African Friends of Ethiopia, and then James migrated to the US Padmore remained in England mobilizing, giving speeches, educating young African nationalists in England.
In the US James met a young African from the Gold Coast, Francis Nkrumah, around 1941. They became good friends and when he told James he was going to England, James gave him a letter of introduction to Padmore. "Dear George," the letter read, "this young man is coming to you…he is not very bright, but do what you can for him because he is determined to throw the Europeans out of Africa."
Padmore groomed Nkrumah, now known as Kwame, to organize the Gold Coast masses and the rest is written in the history books. In 1951 Kwame Nkrumah came to power in the gold Coast, and in 1957 the country, now called Ghana, was granted independence from Britain. George Padmore was an honoured guest at the independence ceremony and at the end of that year he moved to Ghana to become Nkrumah's adviser on African affairs.
Padmore's triumph was brief. In mid-1959 he fell grievously ill of a liver complaint and died on September 23rd.
In an emotional eulogy president Nkrumah said, "There existed between us that rare affinity for which one searches for so long but seldom finds in another human being. We became friends at the moment of our meeting and our friendship developed into that indescribable relationship that exists between two brothers."
And it fell to James, years later, to put the significance of Padmore and Nkrumah in historical perspective, pointing out that, "there were only five million people in the Gold Coast, but ten years after Nkrumah had won independence for the Gold Coast there were some 40 new African states ad a hundred million African people - I have never heard of any revolutionary movement of such tremendous force and power as that which followed Nkrumah." Much of which was owed to George Padmore.