CLAUDIA JONES - LEFT OF KARL MARX

Claudia Jones (1915-1964) was a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist and feminist. Born in Trinidad, Claudia Jones moved to New York in 1924 and lived there for 30 years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties, travelling across the USA to speak and organise. She was sentenced to serve a year and a day in a US federal women's prison before being deported to the UK in 1955, where she founded the West Indian Gazette, Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival. She is buried in Highgate cemetery in London to the left of Karl Marx.

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“I was deported from the USA because as 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.”
Claudia Jones, 1956