I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson

Who was I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson?

Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson was a Sierra Leonean and British West African workers' leader, journalist, activist and politician. Born into a poor Creole family in Sierra Leone, he emerged as a natural leader in school. After attending United Methodist Collegiate School for two years, he dropped out and took a job as an officer in the customs department in 1913. He was dismissed for helping organize a labor strike, but later reinstated to his position a year later. After resigning from his job, he enlisted as a clerk with the Carrier Corps during World War I. After being demobilized in 1920, Wallace-Johnson moved from job to job, before settling as a clerk in the Freetown municipal government. He claimed to have exposed a corruption scandal, which resulted in the incarceration of top officials, including the mayor. After being fired from this job in 1926, he left Sierra Leone and became a sailor. He joined a national seamen union and it is believed that he also joined the Communist Party. In 1930, he helped form the first trade union in Nigeria and attended the International Trade Union Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, where he established a number of contacts. He published articles and edited the Negro Worker, a journal devoted to uniting black workers around the world. He traveled to Moscow, where he claimed to have attended classes on Marxism-Leninism theory, union organization and political agitation.