Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

Art, Activism, Race and Social Justice - 1900/1976
1937
International African
Service Bureau
The International African
Service Bureau (IASB) was a
pan-African organisation
founded in London in 1937 by
West Indians George
Padmore, C. L. R. James,
Amy Ashwood Garvey, T.
Ras Makonnen and Kenyan
nationalist Jomo Kenyatta
and Sierra Leonean labour
activist and agitator I. T. A.
Wallace-Johnson.
1938
Indian Workers Association
The Indian Workers Associations was
established in 1938 with the dual aim: to raise
consciousness of the struggle for Indian
independence among working-class Indians in
Britain, and to protect and enhance their
welfare.
Ras Makonnen was a Guyanese-born Pan-
African activist.He was deported for publishing an
article that claimed that Denmark was producing
the mustard gas being used to kill civilians in the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia.. He became an active
member of the International African Service
Bureau that had formed under George
Padmore's leadership. True to his
entrepreneurial spirit, he opened four restaurants,
the profits from which went towards his political
work, and, along with George Padmore and
Kwame Nkrumah, helped organize the fifth
Pan-African Congress in 1945.
C.L.R. James was a West Indianborn
cultural historian, cricket
writer, and political activist who was
a leading figure in the Pan-African
movement.
James was certified as a teacher
from Trinidad. In 1932 he moved to
England, where he was a cricket
correspondent for The Guardian
(Manchester) and became
increasingly involved in Marxist
politics and the African and West
Indian independence movements.
His most notable work was The
Black Jacobins (1938), a Marxist
study of the Haitian slave revolution
of the 1790s, which won him
widespread acclaim. His political
career spans the period from the
Great Depression in the 1930’s to
the birth of Black Power in the
1970’s
1944
Pan African Federation
PAF was a multi-national Pan-African organisation established in Manchester. It aims included the
promotion of African people and their descendants across the UK, and to secure equality of civil rights.
Its founding groups included the Negro Association (Manchester), Coloured Workers Association
(London), Coloured Peoples Association (Edinburgh), African Union (Glasgow), United
Committee of Colonial and Coloured Peoples' Associations (Cardiff), Association of Students of
African Descent (Dublin), Kikuyu Central Association (Kenya) represented by Jomo Kenyatta,
West African Youth League (Sierra Leone section) represented by Isaac Wallace-Johnson, Friends of
African Freedom Society (Gold Coast)
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