An International African Opinion

Abstract

This chapter describes how London boasted a considerable history of black political activism. Padmore knew of the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, who had convened the first Pan-African conference in 1900 in London's Westminster Hall. Padmore also knew of Duse Mohamed Ali's African Times and Orient Review, which had fostered a pan-Africanist consciousness in the 1910s. Ward's Negro Welfare Association and Reginald Bridgeman's British Section of the LAI had introduced Padmore to politically minded, anticolonialist African students gathered in the West African Students Union (WASU). He likely was impressed with their journal, WASU, which first appeared in March 1926. There was also the Jamaican doctor Harold Moody, who in 1931 created a politically moderate interracial organization, the League of Coloured Peoples, which put out the journal The Keys.