I began researching the story of Claudia Jones, for this blog, against the backdrop of a horrendous eruption of racist, Islamophobic, anti-migrant far-right violence across the UK. To anyone who has been following the political and media discourse over the last few years – in particular since the Conservatives first came back to power to form a government with the Lib Dems in 2010 - none of this is coming as a surprise.
Racist rhetoric and government policies, such as the hostile environment, the monstrous Bibby Stockholm Barge or inhumane legislation to forcibly deport refugees to Rwanda – and, to a large extent, Brexit - have been supplemented by a consistent ‘drip drip’ of misinformation and outright lies about migrants – especially those coming across the Channel.
In parallel, we have witnessed the continued disenfranchisement of working-class citizens – of all colour - up and down the country, increased poverty in the face of the rocketing cost of living, poor housing, poor health outcomes, absence of decent job opportunities and aspirations, widening inequality … while billionaires are steaming ahead! These are, of course, the same billionaires and media barons blaming migrants for stealing jobs, then pointing the finger at the ‘thugs’ – meaning the White working class - for the riots. The riots do not originate in working class communities - they are fuelled by the elite and the far-right to further their vicious agenda.
The government’s response, as expected, is inadequate. More policing and incarcerations will not offer long-term solutions. They will only cause more collective harm – especially to people of colour who are already under incessant scrutiny from the authorities and bearing the brunt of police surveillance. Besides, locking a handful of fascist thugs away is hardly going to remove threat of violence, racism and Islamophobia from our society - it lives amongst us, all the time. People of colour know it too well - they experience it everyday.
These are uncertain and frightening times. But these are also times of solidarity and expressions of love. Last week, as a direct consequence of the fascist violence, we saw tens of thousands of people coming together on the streets to counter the hate, to stand with people of colour and refugees.
Back to Claudia Jones. We have been here before – too many times. People like her were organising against racism last century and we have much to learn from their work and experiences – including that we can only win this through educating ourselves, organising, showing up, and keeping each other safe.
Claudia Jones – an inspiration
We have come to expect Claudia Jones’ name to be thrown into the conversation in the same breath as the Notting Hill Carnival. Some hail her as the 'mother' of the carnival, others say it's a myth. Regardless of her role in helping to establish London’s most amazing street party – and the second largest carnival in the world! - there is a lot about her that is worth shouting out about.
Here, I retrace some of her steps across London.
First, I went South London, to 6 Meadow Road, Vauxhall, London, SW8 1QB, where she moved in 1956, shortly after arriving in the UK. She had been deported from the U.S. for her active role in the Communist Party (CPUSA) – during McCarthy’s 1950s horrifying witch-hunt. In Jones’ own words: “I was deported from the USA because as a 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 … I was deported because I urged the prosecution of lynchers rather than prosecution of Communists and other democratic Americans who oppose the lynchers and big financiers and warmongers, the real advocates of force and violence in the USA”. A message that decades later, still rings so painfully true.
Born Claudia Vera Cumberbatch (1915-1964) in Trinidad, then part of the British Empire. She moved with her family to the U.S, where they went for a better life after the collapse of the coca trade. All they found was poverty and racism. Her mum quite literally worked herself to death to support her family – like so many Black women workers. This experience and the incessant racism and discrimination she and her family faced, politicised her from a young age. Determined to challenge injustice, she joined the CPUSA – the only party with explicitly anti-racist policies - in 1936. Soon after, in addition to working three jobs, she became associate editor of the Weekly Review, the Young Communist League paper – fulfilling her passion for journalism.
She was a proficient writer and thinker, developing the foundations of an intersectional (before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the terminology and developed the theory) feminist theoretical framework on race, class, gender and bringing in an anti-imperialist analysis. She used her position in the party to advocate for Black working-class women. In "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!", published in Political Affairs magazine, in 1949, she clearly articulated why Black women are central to the struggle for liberation. Her ground-breaking ideas shaped the politics of feminists in the 1970’s and influenced academics and philosophers like Angela Davis.
Once in London, she found pretty much the same widespread racism, calls for the control of Black immigration and the British Union of Fascists openly paraded around Brixton. But that didn’t deter Claudia Jones. She picked up where she’d left off in the U.S., continuing her activism and working with London's Afro-Caribbean community. In 1958, she founded the West Indian Gazette (The WIG) with Jamaican, Pan-African activist, Amy Ashwood Garvey. It had regular features by theoreticians such as Franz Fanon, Nelson Mandela, and James Baldwin - connecting the daily struggles of individual Black immigrants in the UK to the ongoing, global struggle against racism, imperialism, and colonialism.
The West Indian Gazette had its offices at 250 Brixton Road, London SW9 6AQ – just up the road from what is now the Black Cultural Archives – a space that grew from a community response to the racism against African and Caribbean descent in the UK and has become the home of Black British History. The beautiful sculpture outside is of none other than Claudia Jones – holding a copy of the Gazette.
Carnival as resistance
From there I went across town to West London – site of the much-celebrated Notting Hill Carnival. First, I detoured via 36 Golborne Road, London W10 5PR, the spot where Kelso Cochrane was murdered on his way home by a violent gang in 1959. This chilling event is considered the first racially motivated killing after the Windrush migration of 1948 and happened the year following the Notting Hill riots of 1958. Hostility and racism against people of colour was widespread – and then as now, exploited for political aims. Fascist politician Oswald Mosley was active in the area and running for MP in North Kensington on a ‘Your Streets’ inciting further violence. Kelso Cochrane murderers were never caught.
The response to his murder from Caribbean community organisers like Claudia Jones was to ‘take space’ - as an integral part of Black working-class resistance. The Western Indian Gazette acted as a sponsor and fundraiser for London's first Caribbean Carnival, in 1959.
The first few editions of the carnival took place indoors in St Pancras Town Hall in King’s Cross. It only hit the streets of Notting Hill after Jones’ untimely death in 1966. Another important piece in the carnival puzzle is Raune Laslett-O’Brien, a London born activist of Russian and Native American heritage. She played a key role in setting up the week-long Notting Hill street party … until both events converged.
Both Jones and Laslett have commemorative plaques at the junction of Tavistock Road and Portobello Road, London W11 1LL - facing each other. Also nearby, is The Tabernacle, a stunning venue closely entwined with the carnival, 34-35 Powis Square, London W11 2AY.
And so the carnival emerged from the darkness of racism and violence like a lotus flower from a swamp, as a physical and spiritual representation of Black defiance. Jones’ vision was to bring together a community of West Indian people who resist racist attacks and showcase their creative and artistic contribution to British culture – decades later it resonates more than ever.
“Spirit of a people that cannot be contained,
that which therefore contains the genesis of their own (self-articulated) freedom”
Claudia Jones
The final chapter takes us to North London. Claudia Jones suffered from tuberculosis as a child growing up in poverty New York, and, as a result, developed a lung condition. She died suddenly at her home in Lisburne Road, London NW3 2NS aged 49. Her final resting place is Highgate East Cemetery where she is befittingly buried to the left of Karl Marx.
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