Introduction

For Claudia Jones

Just to tell you

that part of us

sailed on with you

To tell you

we'll renew our planting

this bleak and mournful day

We'll change the seasons,

the sun and moon

of man-made years

That soon

our tears will flower

into reason's beauty

And our land

will call you home

to be its heart.1

Edith Segal

Claudia Jones was deported from the United States in 1955 because she was a Black radical communist. As the poem above indicates, she was a loved and respected leader admired by her friends and comrades. She was a devoted antiracist and anti-sexist who advocated peace, demilitarization, and anti-imperialism. She was a leading thinker in the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and a prolific writer whose comrades worked diligently to prevent her deportation. Jones was what US intelligence and legislative leaders deemed an enemy of the state and a national security risk. In violation of the constitution and the Bill of Rights, she was monitored, harassed, arrested, and eventually deported from a country she had spent most of her life in. She was sent far from her family, friends, and comrades to a country she had never lived in before, where she would stay for the remainder of her short life.

Jones was also deeply influential, well-known among both Black and white comrades for her acute theoretical grounding and her activism. She was loved by her family and friends, worked with progressives and liberals to improve the lives of women and people of color, and left a legacy for later Black radical feminists. She remained known and influential among a small group of activists and scholars who mined her written and spoken work and eventually resurrected her for a larger audience of activists. Above all, Jones was a committed communist who not only anticipated the consequences of US militarization and capitalism but also envisioned a socialist future, the eradication of monopoly capitalism, and the achievement of social justice for the oppressed. Her writing and activism continue to offer important lessons for contemporary audiences.

The Long Life of Claudia Jones

After her premature death in 1964, scholars and fellow communists kept her in remembrance. Some of her friends and comrades lived long lives after her and taught a younger generation of activists about her life and work. The US communist press regularly featured Jones in articles, and in 1968 a group called the Claudia Jones Club was created in Chicago to honor her legacy and continue her work to seek justice. In 1969 the communist Daily World honored Black history week (which would become Black history month in 1970) with an homage to Jones and her friends Pettis Perry, James Ford, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1974, CPUSA leader and Jones's comrade Henry Winston noted in World Magazine that she "was a passionate voice for truth and justice." That same year, Alva Buxenbaum, a leader in the CPUSA's Women's Commission, published an article in the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) Daily World on US communist women and their struggles for women's rights. She listed Jones as one of the CPUSA's significant leaders.2

In 1981, the scholar and Party activist Angela Davis wrote about Jones in her book Women, Race, and Class, describing her as a leader and "symbol of struggle for Communist women" who had refuted the "usual malesupremacist stereotypes" about women and women's roles. Jones, Davis argued, showed that Black women's leadership had always been essential in people's movements, and would take even her own progressive friends to task for failing to take women's rights and women's roles in the movement seriously. Most important, Jones believed that "socialism held the only promise of liberation for Black women."3

In 1985, Buzz Johnson, a Tobago-born activist, compiled a book on Jones titled "I Think of My Mother": Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones. Published by his own Karia Press, Johnson's book was put together with the help of Jones's friends and comrades, including Donald Hines and Billy Strachan, who had worked with Jones in London. Johnson credited Jones's long-time friend (and former romantic partner) Abhimanyu Manchanda for encouraging the project. It was the first book on Jones, and it included news clippings and speeches offering a history of her life in her own words. The same year, Johnson wrote an article commemorating what would have been Jones's seventieth birthday. He noted that the importance of his book was that, in all the years since she had passed, no work had been done on the study of her life.4

Three years earlier, Buzz and his then partner Yvette Thomas had been involved in founding the Claudia Jones Organization (CJO), set up to address the needs of "African Caribbean women and children." The organization, which still exists today, is based in East London and engages in community outreach and education. Buzz and Yvette's son, Amandla Thomas-Johnson, has talked about Jones's influence on his parents and many others, and how she remained an important presence in London even years after her death. He recalls that as a youth he attended CJO programs including a Saturday school and a summer school. Every year on Jones's birthday the CJO would organize an event at her grave in Highgate cemetery, next to Karl Marx's grave. The group would lay flowers and sing:

Oh Claudia Jones's birthday, Aye Claudia Jones's Birthday, Oh Claudia Jones's Birthday, we celebrate it today.

To Claudia, that female conqueror, in England and America she was a freedom fighter.

The song was written by a Calypso musician to celebrate Jones's life of activism and her commitment to the emancipation of all.5

That the first significant look at Jones's life came out of a London publisher is not surprising, given that her legacy in England is linked to the popular Notting Hill Carnival and her work with London's West Indian community. Though she spent most of her life in the United States, her memory was scarred by anticommunism, and the American friends she left behind still operated in its shadows. In 1987, another London group began its own project to document Jones's life. The Camden Black Sisters (CBS) was founded in 1979 by Lee Kane and Yvonne Joseph as an educational and aid organization for Black women. The group sought to create their own space to discuss issues relevant to African/Caribbean women. CBS was based in Kentish town, where Jones had spent many of her London years, so the group decided to create a project to draw attention to her life and work. Jennifer Tyson, a CBS researcher, reached out to the CPUSA for information on Jones. In 1988, the group published Claudia Jones, 1915-1964: A Woman of Our Times. The book included a personal and political biography and aimed to bring Jones to a wider audience.6

Aside from Angela Davis's earlier work, one of the first scholarly treatments of Jones came from Donna Langston, a professor at the University of Washington. Langston wrote that she first learned about Jones not in the US, where she was virtually unknown except among communists, but from attending a "cross-cultural Black women's studies course" at the University of London. She was told that Jones was the Angela Davis of her time, likened by the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson to Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Langston attributed the silence around Jones in the United States to the narrowing of US political culture during the Cold War. Her name had been forgotten, while others like Robeson or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were remembered. To remember Jones was to engage with the "history of fascism, sexism, classism, and racism."7

In January 1989, Winsome Pinnock, a British playwright whose family was from Jamaica, debuted her play A Rock in the Water at London's Chelsea Royal Court theater. Based on Jones's life, the play was performed by the Royal Court Young People's Theater. It told the story of Jones's ejection from the US and her life in England fighting for the rights of Black Britons against "right-wing extremist groups." Given her own years spent in youth theater, Jones would no doubt have appreciated the fact that young actors were playing the roles, but she likely would not have agreed with the description of fighting against "right-wing extremists" since she just as often criticized liberals for their tepid action on securing justice. The play is currently being adapted for film. That same year, Julie Whittaker from BBC Midlands contacted the CPUSA to gather information for a short documentary titled Claudia Jones: A Woman of Her Time, which was created with input from some of Jones's American comrades, including James and Esther Cooper Jackson, Marvel Cooke, and Louise Weinstock. Both the BBC documentary and the play speak to how Jones's life in England was more readily remembered outside of communist circles than was her life in the United States.8

In the early 1990s, scholar and activist Marika Sherwood was alarmed that so many of the leading West Indian and communist activists who had known Jones...