Claudia Jones

Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad, on the twenty-first of February 1915. Her family emigrated to Harlem in 1924. Her mother died at thirty-seven; her father worked as a building janitor. Claudia took her name Jones from her mother's family on entering political life.

She joined the Young Communist League in 1936 at twenty-one and rose through the Communist Party USA to the National Committee by 1948 — among the most senior Black women in the post-war American Communist movement. She edited the CPUSA's Women's Journal, contributed to the Daily Worker, and authored the 1949 essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!" — among the foundational documents of mid-twentieth-century Black-feminist socialist theory.

She was arrested and tried under the Smith Act in 1948, 1951, and 1953 — the McCarran Internal Security Act and the McCarthy-era prosecutions of the American Communist Party leadership. She was sentenced to a year and a day at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia, in 1953, and was deported from the United States to Britain (where she had British nationality through Trinidad's colonial status) on the seventh of December 1955.

She spent the remaining nine years of her life in Britain. She founded the West Indian Gazette in 1958 — the first major Black British newspaper of the post-war period — and led it through the rise of post-Windrush Caribbean immigration and the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. In response to the riots she organized the first Caribbean Carnival in London at St. Pancras Town Hall in January 1959. The Carnival relocated to the streets of Notting Hill in 1965 (the year after her death) and has been continuously held there since; it is the second-largest street festival in the world after Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval.

She died of a heart attack at her London home on the twenty-fifth of December 1964, age forty-nine. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx's grave.

She is honored here as the Trinidadian-American-British organizer who built Black Britain's two most consequential institutions of the 1950s: the West Indian Gazette and the Notting Hill Carnival.