Claudia Jones – Out From the Shadows

/ historicallywoman

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the title of the foremost scholarly work on the life of Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, was a reference to her place on the political spectrum. Jones was indeed a communist and some considered her more radical than Marx, but the truth of the matter is much simpler: in the shadows to the left of Marx’s imposing tomb lies a small, much-ignored plaque which marks the resting palace of a woman who left no mere shadow on Britain’s culture. 

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1915, Jones came from a poor family whose economic fortunes had worsened with the post-war drop in the cocoa trade. In search of a better life for themselves and their four daughters, Jones’s parents left Trinidad for the US in 1922. The children joined them two years later, when Claudia was eight, and the family settled in Harlem, which was home to a thriving Black culture. 

Claudia Jones, probably during her time in the CPUSA

While in school, Jones joined the Junior National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was the beginning of a long political career, though interrupted by a year-long hospital stay when she was seventeen. The poor conditions of the family’s house in Harlem led Jones to contract tuberculosis, which caused permanent damage to her lungs and meant many more hospital stays as the years passed.

Seeing discrimination all around her, Jones began listening closely to the various orators who spoke on the streets of Harlem, and she found herself impressed by the communists, who, rarely for US political parties at the time, believed in the value and inclusion of Black voices. Upon graduation from high school, Jones joined the Young Communist League and quickly rose through the ranks, impressing those around her with her intelligence and analytical mind. When the League became American Youth for Democracy during WWII, Jones became editor of the monthly journal, Spotlight, then after the war she became secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

Unlike many others in the CPUSA, Jones was keenly aware of the need for intersectionality and the need to link the anti-capitalist fight with anti-racism and feminist movements. She believed that peace could not be attained if women, especially poor women, were excluded from the conversation, and she worked to increase the standing of all women, but especially Black women, in the CPUSA. 

Jones became a respected leader among US Communists, but she was active in the post-Depression era when McCarthyism was taking hold. She was arrested for the first time in 1948 and incarcerated on Ellis Island under the 1918 Immigration Act. She was threatened with deportation back to Trinidad if she did not ‘modify her persistent stand against exploitation and the oppression of Black women in the United States’. 

Between 1948 and 1955, Jones was under constant surveillance from the FBI and she would be imprisoned on four separate occasions. The last time was in 1955 at a women’s prison in West Virginia; it was supposed to last a year and a half but she was released on 23rd October. She was supposed to be deported that year but was refused entry to Trinidad and Tobago. As the country was still a British colony at the time, Jones was instead sent to the UK, leaving Harlem on 7th December 1955.

Though Jones was initially welcomed by a delegation of Caribbean communists from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), she quickly found that the situation in the UK was entirely different to the US. The CPGB was borderline hostile to Black people and women in leadership roles, and the men in charge did not look kindly on her critiques of the patriarchy and racism within the Party. Still, Jones remained a member of the CPGB until her death and she managed to establish herself as a pioneer and a leader despite the opposition.

She became particularly involved with the growing Afro-Caribbean community in London. She soon began to identify with pan-Africanism, a movement that had been a foundation of her childhood: ‘My father’s social ideas instilled in us were that of a pride and consciousness of our people, of our relation to Africa’, she wrote. 

“people without a voice were as lambs to the slaughter.”

Claudia Jones, upon founding the West Indian Gazette

In 1958, Jones founded and subsequently became editor of the West Indian Gazette, which she worked on with Amy Ashwood Garvey, a fellow pan-African activist. Jones’s biographer, Carole Boyce Davies, has argued that the newspaper had ‘a foundational role in developing the Caribbean diaspora in London’, and it was certainly a huge contributor to consciousness within the Black British community. Within a few years, the Gazette became widely circulated with a dedicated readership, however Jones was so integral to its existence that it collapsed less than a year after her death.

Jones also campaigned against racism and apartheid, marching on the US Embassy in solidarity with Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and supporting the release of Nelson Mandela. What she is perhaps most famous for, however, is the founding of the West Indian Gazette’s Caribbean Carnival. This has sometimes been called the precursor to the Notting Hill Festival, however this claim has been refuted.

The Carnival was a celebration of Black Caribbean culture which took place in January 1959. The impetus was the Notting Hill race riots in December 1958 and riots in Nottingham; after these events, Jones identified the need to ‘wash the taste of Notting Hill and Nottingham out of our mouths’. The Carnival was broadcast nationally by the BBC, displaying Black excellence on televisions across the country. Most white people in Britain would never have seen anything like it.

One of the key moments of the Carnival was the beauty contest organised by Jones. She knew the importance of highlighting Black beauty; these contests were usually reserved for white or white-passing people, so Jones put out a call for Caribbean women of all skin tones to take part. All of them were featured in the Carnival’s souvenir brochure and the contest was also televised. One of the participants said: ‘without Claudia we would not have known [we were beautiful] because we used to judge everybody’s beauty by the European standard. But Claudia [made] us proud of ourselves’.

The Caribbean Carnival was held annually until 1964, taking place in different London locations – none of which, as it happens, was Notting Hill. The reason it ended was likely Jones’s death; she died on Christmas Eve 1964, aged 49, having suffered a massive heart attack.

Claudia Jones’s grave in Highgate Cemetery; it is the small plaque to the left of Karl Marx’s tomb

Claudia Jones has since faded from our memory, a byproduct of being female and Caribbean in the era of great men such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Britain forgot her due to her being Black and she now lies in the shadow of another man, when she should be out in the sun, taking the glory she is owed.

Sources:

Leave a Reply