Claudia Jones

Born in 1915 in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Claudia Jones was a communist, Black nationalist, journalist, community leader, feminist and more. At age eight, Jones moved to Harlem, NY with her family. She graduated high school, though her education was cut short after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which she would have for the rest of her life. 

Following graduation, she worked retail jobs while writing a column called “Claudia Comments” for a Harlem journal. In 1936, 18-year-old Jones joined the Young Communist League USA. A year later, she became a member of the editorial staff for the Communist Party USA’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, and the following year rose to the Weekly Review editor. During World War II, the Young Communist League became American Youth for Democracy, of which Jones led its monthly journal, Spotlight. Throughout young adulthood, she grew in her writing, leading various communist publications. 

Following the war, Jones became the executive secretary for the Women’s National Commission, secretary of the Women’s Commissions of the Communist Party USA, and would later take the same positions for the National Peace Council in 1952. 

Her advocacy centered the liberation of Black women from the intersecting discrimination of racism, sexism, and classism that they face, as well as decolonization, anti-imperialism, civil rights, and gender equality. During the 1940s-50s was the second Red Scare, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted radical activists like Jones. By May 1947, she was denied naturalization because of her political affiliations. It was 1955 when the U.S. government deported Jones to the U.K. Jones suspected that she was allowed in England rather than Trinidad because British officials did not want to send a “radical agitator” to a colony where locals were organizing.

”I was a victim of the McCarthyite hysteria against independent political ideas in the USA… I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman Communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights and my general political activity urging the American people to help by their struggles to change the present foreign and domestic policy of the United States… I was deported because I urged prosecution of the lynchers rather than the prosecution of the Communists and other democratic Americans who oppose the lynchers and big financiers and war mongers, the real advocates of force and violence in the USA.” -Jones, Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical

Jones continued her activism in the U.K, focusing on the West Indian immigrant community in London. In 1958, she founded the U.K.’s first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News. With this platform, Jones organized the first Caribbean carnival in 1959, which is widely credited as the precursor of today’s Notting Hill Carnival. 

Jones passed away at 49 years old after a heart attack caused by heart disease and the tuberculosis she had since childhood, which left her with irreparable lung damage. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London in a plot to the left of the tomb of Karl Marx.