Jones, Claudia

JONES, CLAUDIA (1915-1964). Born Claudia Cumberbatch in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1915, Jones arrived in Harlem, New York in 1924 to join her parents who had arrived two years earlier. Jones would later acknowledge that it was her life growing up in the United States that radicalized her and drew her to the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Her mother died at work when she was young. As a teenager, Jones contracted tuberculosis; at the sanitorium she offered to donate blood to a white woman, but the other patients warned the woman that she would become Black. After high school, Jones worked in factories and faced the harsh work environment and racism she believed killed her mother. Jones’s experience as a Black woman shaped her radical sentiments, but it was the CPUSA’s defense of the Scottsboro boys and its opposition to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia that drew her to the Party. In 1936 she became a member.

Jones worked in the Young Communist League and became the associate editor of its Weekly Review and the leader of the National Negro Council’s Youth Council in Harlem. She also began to work for the Daily Worker and wrote a regular column focused on Black issues. Jones’s journalistic work raised awareness within CPUSA ranks about the relationship between racism and class oppression and that even among communists “white chavunism” could prevent the unity needed for revolutionary change. In 1945, she became involved in an internal Party debate over the 1928 Black Belt thesis. She criticized CPUSA chairman Earl Browder’s criticisms of the policy and as a result became a respected voice among Black communists. Her writing and leadership would evolve to make her a central theoretician within the Party and for Black radical feminists.

As Jones became a more visible leader and writer in the Party, American intelligence officials began to notice. In 1942, the FBI began its surveillance of her, but because she used the name Jones rather than her surname Cumberbatch, it took the agency nearly five years to realize she was an immigrant. In 1940, Jones tried to become a naturalized citizen but was denied because she was a communist. Once the FBI realized she was not a citizen it plotted to have her deported. In 1948, Jones was arrested and detained at Ellis Island along with other radicals, accused of seeking to overthrow the US government. The Bureau was eager to eject her from the country, but the Party rallied in her defense.

Even under legal pressure, Jones remained active in the Party and wrote some of her most important work, most notably her essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women.” In this and other articles she articulated the “triple oppression” of Black women. She argued that Black women faced race, class, and gender oppression and that by focusing class struggle on freeing the most oppressed, all would be free. It is here where she expanded on Marxist economic determinism and insisted that race and gender oppression could not be subsumed within the class struggle because even among radicals racism and sexism prevented unity. In this essay and in many of Jones’s other works, including her regular column in the Daily Worker “Half the World,” she articulated an emancipatory ethos that continued to resonate with radical feminists.

The pressures of Cold War anticommunism would continue to bear down on Jones and her colleagues. Many radical Black activists were critical of Cold War policy because it was leading the United States down a path of militarization and constant warfare. Jones became a vocal peace activist and critic of the Truman and later Eisenhower administrations’ pursuit of containment and anticommunism. She wrote several articles and columns on the global peace movement, led by the Soviet Union. Jones believed that it was this work that led to her second arrest in 1950 under the McCarran Internal Security Act. The Act empowered the state to deport radicals who taught or advocated the violent overthrow of the US government, but the deportation order was cancelled. On June 20, 1951, Jones was arrested a third time, along with sixteen other Party members, and charged under the Smith Act. The following summer Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act that allowed courts to convict individuals using their written and spoken word in support of a totalitarian regime. The state now had a more robust infrastructure to finally achieve its goal to deport Jones.

Jones and twelve other co-defendants went on trial in March 1952, a trial that lasted for nine months. Using Jones’s own written work as evidence, she and her fellow defendants were convicted. After a failed appeal, the defendants were allowed to address the court. Jones told the court that the only thing she was convicted for was her belief in communism and that the arrests and trial were a constitutional violation. She was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and a $2000 fine. Jones was remanded to a segregated women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. Throughout the course of her imprisonment the FBI continued to plot her deportation and planned to detain her upon her release. Meanwhile, Jones’s health began to decline after she experienced heart failure.

In October 1955 Jones was released from prison and would spend the next two months in and out of the hospital in poor health and fighting a deportation order. Finally, in December 1955, too ill to continue the legal fight. she agreed to leave the country. She was deported to London, England where she was welcomed by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Jones’s adjustment to England was difficult because of her poor health and conflicts with the CPGB. Which was less committed to antiracism and anticolonialism than its American counterpart. Jones turned to the British West Indian community and founded the West Indian Gazette, a monthly newspaper. She was also a founder of the Notting Hill Carnival celebration. Though a committed communist until the end of her life, Jones became well-known in Great Britain as an important leader in the West Indian community. She died on Christmas Eve 1964, two months before her fiftieth birthday. She was buried next to Karl Marx in London’s Highgate cemetery.

Boyce Davies, Carole. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

Boyce Davies, Carole “Claudia Jones, Anti-Imperialist, Black Feminism Politics.” In Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies, edited by Davies, C. M, Gasby, C. Peterson & H. Williams, 45-60, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc, 2003.

Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

McDuffie, Erik. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Mislán, Cristina, “Claudia Jones speaks to “half the world”: gendering Cold War politics in the Daily Worker, 1950–1953,” Feminist Media Studies, 17:2, (2017): 281-296.