Found at: http://www.yclusa.org/article/articleprint/1642/-1/298/
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Working Class Heroes: Claudia Jones
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Dynamic Magazine
Back Issues
2004 - October
This year, the massive annual Notting Hill Festival in London, England is remembering the life and work of Claudia Jones, “mother of the Notting Hill Festival�. In her memory it is being hosted under the slogan of “Freedom and Justice�.
Many progressive and socialist leaders have been almost forgotten in the US. But the broad movement for justice and democracy does its best to remember these heroes of the past.
This year, the massive annual Notting Hill Festival in London, England is remembering the life and work of Claudia Jones, “mother of the Notting Hill Festival�. In her memory it is being hosted under the slogan of “Freedom and Justice�.
Claudia Jones began her life in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad in 1915. When Claudia was eight years old, and she and her sisters were sent to join their parents in Harlem, NY. The family lived in extreme poverty, and Claudia contracted asthma and tuberculosis by the time she was17. Claudia couldn’t afford a gown to wear to her high school graduation - even though she was the valedictorian. After high school Claudia went to work in a laundry, like so many other young Black women.
At the age of eighteen, Claudia was fed up and disgusted with the system that relegated Blacks to the depths of poverty and supported regular lynchings. She decided to join in the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black boys who had been framed and charged with raping two white girls. Claudia was introduced to and joined the Young Communist League USA (YCL-USA). Later in life, she explained that she joined the YCL because she saw them as the most fervent defenders of Scottsboro Boys.
Claudia became the YCL organizer for Harlem, then New York State Educational Director and New York State Chair. She wrote for the Daily Worker newspaper and was very active in the local Junior NAACP as well as local social and theater groups.
She became known for her understanding of the ways that race and sexual oppression were compounded on Black women in the US, noting their “almost complete exclusion from virtually all fields of work except the most menial and underpaid�. Her research on the social roles of Black women and their presentation in the media was groundbreaking, and laid the groundwork of the later Black Feminist school of theory and struggle. She spoke on these themes in every state in the union.
Claudia Jones held several leadership roles in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which she had joined in 1945. She was arrested several times for her membership in the CPUSA. Finally, under the anti-immigrant McArran Act, she was jailed for a year with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - the CPUSA leader known as ‘the Rebel Girl’ - and Betty Gannett. Claudia was deported from the US: away from the life she had built and the comrades who struggled for so long at her side.
The colonial governor of Trinidad refused her entry, for fear she would make trouble. Finally she arrived in England. There she took up work in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The CPGB had serious problems with racism, and relegated her to menial tasks. Regardless, she continued to work in the CPGB and broke much ground there in the struggle for equality in England. It was a time of large Carribean and African migration into England from its colonies and Claudia took up work in these communities. Claudia founded the West Indian Gazette - the first newspaper of the Black community in England - as a fighting paper with the goal of equality and self respect.
After the 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots, Claudia was able to pull people in the community together towards productive action. Under the slogan “A People’s Art is the Genesis of their Freedom� Claudia held large parties in the Notting Hill region to “present West Indian talent to the public, which at the time could not see Caribbean people as anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water.� Under her lead these parties formed into the largest street party in Europe, the Notting Hill Festival, which continues today.
At the age of 49, Claudia died in exile on Christmas Eve. Her fighting history is being honored by this year’s 40th Annual Notting Hill Festival of Caribbean Culture.
Shane McEvoy is a student at Hunter College, CUNY and a restaurant worker. He is a member of the Claudia Jones Club of the YCL and a resident of Brooklyn, NY.
