Claudia Jones the Activist
Claudia Jones was born in 1915 in Trinidad in the West Indies, whilst still a child her family emigrated to Harlem, New York USA, where she was raised. She was close to her father, a journalist and editor by profession. He was a great influence.
As a teenager Claudia was forced to leave school and start working to help ends meet when her mother died. In doing so she became starkly aware of the injustices all around her and the hardship felt by the Black community, woman, and the working class.
Claudia believed in dismantling the systems that kept people like her poor, marginalised, and voiceless so as a teenager she joined the Communist Party USA as the way to achieve her beliefs. By the 1940s, Claudia was editing The Daily Worker (a communist and socialist publication) and writing essays. In 1949 she wrote a pivotal essay An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman, documenting the daily struggles faced by Black women.
America clamped down hard on communists, Claudia was monitored, arrested and imprisoned four times. She was eventually deported in 1955 because of her communist beliefs. Har family and friends fought hard for her to remain in the US but to no avail. She was forced to leave America – and her beloved father. The authorities deported Claudia to the UK - not to Trinidad as the UK authorities felt she would be a bad influence and the British would keep an eye on her in the UK. The following’s an excerpt from Claudia’s statement to the court –
"Your honour there are a few things I wish to say…… or, even with all the power your Honor holds, how can you decide to mete out justice for the only act to which I proudly plead guilty, and one, moreover, which by your own prior rulings constitutes no crime—that of holding Communist ideas; of being a member and officer of the Communist Party of the United States? Will you measure, for example, as worthy of one year’s sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a Communist I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class?."...
Activism in print. Claudia founded the West Indian Gazette in 1958 — the UK’s first major Black newspaper. The newspaper was about community. That same year, in response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, she organised a Caribbean Carnival – which laid the foundations for what later became the Notting Hill Carnival, The event was held indoors in St Pancras Town Hall.
Claudia died too young in 1964, but her tenacity and legacy of community lives on.