Claudia Jones, communist
Today is Mother’s Day. Claudia Jones too thought
often of her mother. At a party given for her in New York, Claudia spoke about
the early influences that pointed her in the direction of communism:
“On this, my 37th birthday, I think of my
mother. My mother, a machine worker in a garment factory, died when she was
just the same age I am today – 37 years old. I think I began then to develop an
understanding of the suffering of my people and my class and to look for a way
to end them.”[1]
Right from the start, Claudia realised that what
she and her family was suffering in New York was also being suffered by
working-class people of every race and nationality, even if black people and
women were often suffering more.
A recent issue of British stamps featured Claudia
Jones, describing her as a civil-rights activist. Her best-known achievement is
that she is considered the mother of the Notting Hill Carnival, the biggest
carnival in Europe. All very respectable, but concealing the fact that, first
and foremost, Claudia was a communist.
She became a communist at the age of 18. Her reason
for doing so was that in the United States, where she grew up, the only
political party fighting the country’s institutionalised racism was the
Communist Party. In particular, the Communist Party USA had taken up the case
of the Scottsboro boys,[2] nine black youths unjustly accused
in 1931 of raping two white women and convicted without any serious opportunity
to defend themselves by an all-white jury.[3]
The Communist Party took the lead in this matter,
eventually being joined by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in forming the Scottsboro Defense Committee. Because of
the work of this Committee, five defendants were released and the four other
defendants’ death sentences were commuted to lengthy terms of imprisonment. One
of the two women who had allegedly been raped courageously withdrew her
testimony and admitted that she had succumbed to pressure in Alabama to make
false accusations, but still the US ‘justice’ system was incapable of declaring
all the defendants to be innocent.
However, the fact that the CPUSA had mobilised to
save their lives, and, in the course of the mobilisation, had also taken a
stand against segregation in public services and exposed the inherent racism of
the legal system, meant that it gained massive support from working-class black
people. It was in this context that Claudia joined the Young Communist League
in 1934.
In a speech made to a court in February 1953,
Claudia explained:
“It was out of my Jim Crow[4] experiences
as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that
led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my
life, the science of Marxism Leninism – that philosophy that not only rejects
racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them.” [5]
Intelligent, hard-working, committed, Claudia rose
rapidly in the ranks of the YCL. According to Buzz Johnson, “The organiser
of the political education classes at the time recalls that Claudia quickly
grasped the scientific basis of the economic and historical theories and
developed a deep interest in the theory of scientific socialism. She studied
and worked hard.” [6]
Claudia was elected to the chair of the National
Council of the YCL in 1940, became Education Officer for New York State in 1940 and National Director in 1940. She worked on the YCL’s weekly newspaper, for
which she wrote regularly, and in due course became its editor.
In 1945, Claudia was accepted into membership of
the CPUSA, and was appointed editor for Negro affairs in the party’s newspaper,
the Daily Worker. In 1947, she was appointed executive secretary of the
National Women’s Commission, and in 1948 was elected to the National Committee
of the CPUSA. In 1952, she was assigned to the National Peace Commission, which
was leading the opposition to the Korean War,[7] and in 1953
she became the editor of Negro Affairs Quarterly, a party journal.
In these various capacities, Claudia toured the US extensively to speak at meetings in all 43 states. She was welcomed as a powerful orator with a
deep understanding of the party’s policies.
Her devotion to the cause is further proved by the
fact that she undertook this punishing schedule despite very poor health.
Tuberculosis contracted when she was 17 had left her with a weak heart, which
frequently caused her lengthy hospitalisations. She did not, however, allow
herself to become an invalid, but, on the contrary, undertook a much heavier
burden of work than was the norm.
During the second world war, while the US was fighting on the same side as the Soviet Union against Hitler, the Communist Party was able to
build up its forces. At this time, opportunities opened up for the poorest
sections of American society, including black people, in war industries and in
the armed forces. Once the war was over, however, and the army demobbed,
competition for jobs intensified, and it was taken for granted that black
people could be dismissed to make way for unemployed white people.
The US ruling class had no compunction whatsoever
in exploiting American workers’ racist weaknesses to turn their anger against
black workers, with frustrated whites resorting with alarming regularity to
lynching of black people, who were subjected to a reign of terror.
In these post-war conditions, communism – which was
fighting tooth and nail against racism and to defend the rights of all workers
to work and to decent living conditions – became an increasing threat to the US
ruling class. It responded by mobilising anti-communist hysteria, using
propaganda techniques undoubtedly copied from Nazi Germany.
Legislation was passed that was designed to curtail
the activities of communists, and, needless to say, Claudia Jones, as one of
the most active and prominent members of the CPUSA, soon found herself being
prosecuted and harassed under this legislation.
The two principal acts involved were known as the
Smith Act (Alien Registration Act, 1940) and the McCarran Act (Internal
Security Act, 1950). The Smith Act made it illegal for any alien to engage in
“subversive activities”, ie, to advocate overthrowing the government of the US by force or violence. The McCarran Act applied to American citizens as well, requiring all
Communist Party members to register with the Attorney General! This was the act
under which Paul Robeson had his passport and right to travel revoked by the US government from 1950-58.
Claudia’s first arrest was on 19 January 1948,
under the Smith Act. She was one of some 150 ‘aliens’ that the US sought to deport at this time. She was liable to deportation because she was technically a
Trinidadian, even though she had lived in the US for 24 of her 33 years and had
no links whatever to Trinidad or, indeed, anywhere else. She was locked up in a
prison on Ellis Island, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, which prompted
the editor of the US Daily Worker to write:
“The Lady with the Lamp, the Statue of Liberty, stands in New York Harbour. Her back is squarely turned on the USA. It’s no wonder, considering what she would have to look upon. She would weep, if she
had to face this way.” (23 January, 1948)
Claudia was bailed out of jail by the American Committee
for the Protection of the Foreign Born (a party-supported organisation), and
the CPUSA organised for letters of protest to be sent to President Truman.
Claudia refused to participate in the hearings on the ground that they were
unconstitutional (the US constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech and
thought), and the case was adjourned.
However, a deportation order was in the end made in
June 1950, against which an appeal was immediately launched. In October 1950,
with the appeal against the Smith Act deportation still pending, new
proceedings were brought against her under the McCarran Act, which had newly
come into effect. Undoubtedly, the principal motivation behind these new
proceedings was her stance, and that of her party, against the war of aggression
launched by the US and its allies against Korea.
At her trial, held between 31 March 1952 and
February 1953, Claudia was convicted and ordered to serve a year and a day in
jail, and thereafter to be deported. She appealed. Of course, she lost the
appeal and finally commenced serving her jail sentence in January 1955. She was
extremely ill with coronary heart disease, yet was denied the salt-free diet
she needed, until a court ordered she should have it or be released.
It should be noted that the CPUSA was not an
illegal party. In none of the court proceedings did the prosecution admit that
the real reason for persecution of communists, especially those of foreign
birth, was to reduce the Communist Party’s ability to campaign against racism,
against war and in favour of justice for the American poor. Instead, the
alleged ‘crime’ was advocating the overthrow by force of the US government.
Claudia’s main defence, which one assumes is the
defence the CPUSA wanted her to run, was that the party did not advocate the
use of violence to overthrow the US government. In fact, however, conditions
were not ripe in the US for overthrowing the US government by force, so the
party could not be said to have been advocating this at that time. However, at
the time, the party would have adopted Khrushchevite revisionist concepts of
there being a peaceful road to socialism, and, in that context, the defence was
genuine. What brought Claudia down was evidence that, in party schools, texts
such as Lenin’s State and Revolution were still studied, and it is
certain that, at the time, party members would still have been arguing at such
schools of the inevitability of use of force in the process of overthrowing
capitalism.
The defence of the unconstitutionality of the laws
under which Claudia was being tried was also brought. As one commentator said
at the time of the Smith Act, “This law of ill fame is unconstitutional
because it violates the first amendment by penalising the advocacy of political
ideas. It runs counter to the great American tradition of free speech, which
has always held that opinion and advocacy, even of revolution, are permissible
in our democracy and that only overt illegal acts or direct incitements to such
are punishable.” (cited in Johnson p.23)
This comment is equally applicable to the McCarran
Act. This defence could have been followed through by pointing out that the United States was established by people who rose up in arms against the ‘legitimate’ government of
the United Kingdom over the territory. Quite rightly, Claudia pointed out that
she was being persecuted because “as a Negro woman, I have dared to
challenge the civil rights lip-service cry of [Truman’s] reactionary
administration which has yet to lift a finger to prosecute the lynchers, the Ku
Klux Klan or the anti-semites”.
In the face of such institutionalised injustice, it
was entirely within the American traditions that its constitution claimed to
uphold that such an unjust regime ought to be overthrown.
In the end, despite the best efforts of the CPUSA,
Claudia Jones decided on her release from jail to abandon her appeals against
deportation on the understanding that she would be deported to the UK rather than to Trinidad.
It must have been an important consideration that,
in the UK, medical treatment was available that would not have been available
in Trinidad. She boarded the Queen Elizabeth on 9 December 1955, amidst
a crowd of hundreds, who had come to bid her farewell.
Almost immediately after her arrival in the UK, Claudia was admitted to St Stephen’s Hospital in London, suffering from combined hypertensive
and arteriosclerotic heart disease, calcifying pleuritis and non-specific
bronchitis with emphysema.
Claudia in
London
Claudia came to London with enthusiastic
endorsement of her capabilities from the Communist Party of the USA. She made contact with the Communist Party of Great Britain and was enrolled as a
member. The CPGB, however, appears to have made little use of her talents, and
various people have described her relationship with the party as “difficult”.
Claudia’s biographers, Marika Sherwood and Carole
Boyce Davies, are anti-communists, whose interest in Claudia was sparked by
their black nationalist views. Claudia herself, although in the forefront of
fighting for the interests of black people, was in no way a black nationalist.
She was very clear in her proletarian class orientation. She had already spoken
to the US court of her “passionate idea of fighting for full unequivocal
equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a communist I believe can
only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class”. (Court speech
reproduced in Johnson, p.121)
However, because of Claudia’s heroic
stance while in the US, and her outstanding achievements in the UK in
initiating Carnival and mobilising in this country against racism and racist
immigration laws, black nationalists cannot but be interested in her – but this
is despite her communist affiliations, not because of them.
The black-nationalist perspective is always tainted
by a belief that racism is ingrained in white people, for which reason it is
necessary for black people to organise separately against white people in order
to promote their interests. For this reason, these biographers are anxious to
stress the difficulties Claudia appears to have encountered within the CPGB and
to attribute these difficulties to the race prejudice of party members.
However, the examples Marika Sherwood gives of race prejudice within the party
do not support her case very well, because she is forced to admit that after
inner-party debate on the issues in question (eg, whether there should be
separate black branches, and the removal of somewhat chauvinist formulations
regarding the relationship of Britain to the colonies following the establishment
of socialism), the progressive side won the argument in every case.
On the other hand, it is strange that
Claudia was (a) given no paid employment within the party similar to what she
had had in the CPUSA; (b) was never a member of any higher organ of the party,
and (c) despite her extensive journalistic experience in the US, rarely contributed articles to the Daily Worker. Clearly all was not well between Claudia and
the party. This problem led her to write a memorandum to the party, which is
preserved in the CPGB archives:
“Another aspect I want to raise is the Party’s
evaluation towards me as an individual regarding getting settled down in this
country, both politically and financially … I want clarification as to what
basis and what estimate they have of my assets to the Party. There have been
times when I have resisted concluding that either I’m to be retired from
political life or so invalided that I must lead a sedentary life – or if the
opposite is true, then not only clarification but some implementation would
appear to be required.”[8]
In a tribute at Claudia’s funeral, Gertrude Elias
mentioned that “One day I ran into her [Claudia] in Oxford Street and I asked her: ‘You are probably sent all over the country to address
meetings, that’s why we never see you on a London platform?’ ‘Ha’, she said in
her very own way, ‘not at all. I might as well be dead.’” (cited in
Johnson, p.163)
Claudia’s political
positions
We would almost certainly have more concrete
knowledge of her political positions had the political journal which she kept
all her life, and from which she was accustomed to reading extracts to her
close friends, not disappeared after her death.[9]
The behaviour of the party towards her does suggest
that she had major differences with the party leadership, and certainly she
fought within the CPGB, as she had within the CPUSA, for the adoption of
correct policies and activities on the question of race and internationalism.[10]
It does not follow, however, that racism within the
party was the reason for Claudia’s isolation. The fact is that throughout
Claudia’s life in Britain, the CPGB had split the communist movement in the UK
by following a Khrushchevite line that demanded (a) the denunciation of Stalin,
(b) the adoption of the policy of the possibility of a peaceful road to
socialism, and, after 1963 when the Chinese Communist Party made its criticisms
public, (c) the denunciation of China and Mao Zedong because they opposed
Khrushchevism.
It seems clear that Claudia was at odds with the
party leadership on all these points. As a loyal party member to the end of her
life, she did not publicly state her views. However, the fact that she
maintained a close relationship with Comrade Abhimanyu Manchanda, a prominent
communist who was expelled from the CPGB for opposing the revisionist policies
it adopted after Khrushchev came to power in the USSR, until her death is
indicative of her political thinking on the question of Stalin and on the
question of China, since Manchanda himself was a strong supporter of both.[11] Her
support for China is further proved by the visit she made to China in 1964, a
few months before she died, when she was highly enthused by everything she saw.
On her return from China she wrote:
“I observed first hand with my own eyes the
magnificent achievements of 15 years of Socialist Construction and its effect
on lives, agricultural industry and society of the 650 million people of the
New Socialist China. I talked and spoke to many of China’s leaders – in
government, in the People’s Communes, in light and heavy industry – in the
ardent revolutionary men, women, youth and children of New Socialist China who
are led by the Chinese Communist Party and their world Communist leader,
Chairman Mao Tse-tung … The great achievements in Socialist Construction in
New China, based on its policy of Self Reliance which permeates every aspect of
its society – in agriculture and industrialisation in light and heavy industry.
A new morality pervades this ancient land which less than 15 years ago was
engaged in a bitter, protracted anti-imperialist armed struggle to free itself
from the ravages of feudalism, semi-colonialism, bureaucratic capitalism and
imperialism, and achieved victory over US imperialism, the Kuomintang puppets
and the Japanese militarists.”[12]
Claudia was an honoured guest in China in a delegation that went to meet Comrade Mao Zedong himself, whom she met twice –
once as part of a South American delegation and once on her own.[13]
The CPGB’s record on internationalism and fighting
racism at that time was by and large an honourable one. Members of the party
had set up a British branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress in May 1948, and
the CLC’s paper, Caribbean News, was set up in 1952 and kept going until 1956,
printed on the CPGB’s printing press at no cost to the CLC (although Marika
Sherwood claims that the CLC received little support from the party). Trevor
Carter wrote that:
“The CLC kept up our morale in the face of
racism from all sides at the workplace, gave us political direction and enabled
us to make a collective contribution to the labour movement as black workers.
It was the CLC which was responsible for organising the presence of young black
people at the World Youth Festivals. As CLC members, we carried out hundreds of
speaking engagements at trade union branches up and down the country, either
drumming up support for the independence movement in the West Indies, or
organising opposition to the first moves towards racist immigration laws in
Britain …” (Carter, pp.46-7)
The CLC, incidentally, was proscribed as a
communist front by the Labour Party and the TUC.
Furthermore, Trevor Carter is forced to admit that
the CPGB was the only party in the UK that was “in complete opposition to
quotas and controls for Commonwealth immigrants”. Claudia Jones herself
wrote in this context:
“[A]ll other parties have capitulated in one way
or another to this racialist measure. A recent statement of the Executive
Committee of the British Communist Party declared its opposition to all forms
of restrictions on coloured immigration; declared its readiness to contest
every case of discrimination; urged repeal of the Commonwealth Immigration Act;
and called for equality of access for employment, rates of wages, promotion to
skilled jobs, and opportunities for apprenticeship and vocational training …
It also projected the launching of an ideological campaign to combat racialism,
which it noted, infects wide sections of the British working class.”[14]
It is, of course, impossible that the party’s
entire membership should be completely free of race prejudice. Britain had long justified its imperialist activity on the pretext that ‘inferior races’ benefited
from having Britain controlling their countries, and the belief that black
people were inferior was deeply embedded in the psyche of most white British
people.
The British bourgeoisie, through its control of the
media and the labour aristocracy, took advantage of this race prejudice to
divert British people into blaming the immigrants for the deprivation to which
the bourgeoisie subjected the working class, whether they were white or black,
and the media were full of hysterical articles about the need to avoid being
‘swamped’, much as today the bourgeois media never allow a day to go by without
giving a nudge to backward racist thinking with a plethora of articles that
explain how the government has ‘lost control’ of immigration, the implication
being that the presence of immigrants in this country is a terrible problem –
propaganda of which the fascist British National Party takes full advantage.
However, it is clear that the CPGB did give a lead
in combating that racism, and, indeed, was the only British party doing so. Of
course, it is possible, because of its policy of seeking alliance with the
Labour Party, which was then as it is now, a party of imperialism, that it
toned down its activity to some extent in order to avoid offending labour
aristocrats promoting colour bars in some British unions. Nevertheless,
whatever its weaknesses and whatever the backwardness of some of its ordinary
members, it was possible for party members to work effectively on issues of
race.
Trevor Carter quotes a black communist expressing
views that Claudia almost certainly shared:
“I stayed in the Communist Party because I
disagreed with those who claimed that the racism of the left was an inherent
and permanent feature of their attitudes. I felt that since racism was part of
the ideological structure of a bourgeois capitalist society, those same
comrades could learn and change their attitudes.
“An important feature in my thinking was that,
in order to liberate myself and other black people, we have also got to help
liberate our white brothers and sisters. You can’t win one struggle without the
other. But what convinced me more than anything was seeing how the many black
comrades who left the party found themselves in what I would describe as a
rudderless ship, and how quickly careerism became of paramount importance in
their lives.
“I was one of those who went to complain to
Johnny Gollan about the lack of black leadership in the party. But I have stuck
with it. That was the only serious disagreement I’ve had with the party in all
these years. I don’t think the party is dealing properly with racism and sometimes
I get angry. But I know who I am. I am a communist and I have come to terms
with where I can and can’t reach.
“I have a sense of fulfilment being a communist
and I’m not selling out. The Labour Party occasionally has enticed me, but I
know that my political education couldn’t improve anywhere but in the Communist
Party.”[15]
The West Indian
Gazette and carnival
Claudia’s arrival in London happened to coincide
with the demise of the Caribbean News (which, for reasons explained above, had
never been an official party newspaper). Yet never had the need for such a
newspaper been more acute. At the time Claudia arrived in London, black people
living in this country were subjected to gross discrimination in the provision
of housing and of services.
The Race Relations Act did not become law until
1976, and, before then, colour bars were not illegal and were to be found
everywhere – in employment, in rental housing, in the grant of mortgages, in
catering – black people were subjected to daily humiliation. Black people were
arriving from the West Indies in large numbers partly because immigration to
the United States had recently been blocked, and partly because of active
recruitment of black people for jobs in the National Health Service and
transport in particular.
What could be more natural for Claudia that as a
communist she should put herself to work within the black community in order to
serve its needs? It would have been self evident to Claudia that it was a
matter of utmost priority for communists to take up the question of racism,
both because it is the duty of communists to defend the interests of all
sections of the working class and because it is their duty to fight strenuously
to prevent the bourgeoisie dividing the working class against itself.
She had acquired, through her work in the Communist
Party of the USA, both the journalistic skills and the organisational skills to
bring out a replacement newspaper for the Caribbean News, which she proceeded
to do with effect from 1958, some two years after her arrival, although she did
not secure free printing facilities from the party.
She sought, however, to give her West Indian
Gazette a broader appeal than its predecessor by focussing beyond simply the
employment issues that had been the latter’s main concern. She also dealt
extensively with Caribbean people’s contribution to the arts, for example. She
also ensured her readership was kept informed of anti-imperialist struggles
worldwide, as well as of political developments in the West Indies:
“WIG was present to celebrate Castro’s
revolution by promoting the film Island Aflame. It shook its fist at the Congo civil war and the abandonment of Patrice Lumumba. It printed the picture of Lumumba
without his spectacles, bound and in a truck to be delivered into the hands of
his rival Moise Tshombe, the West’s place-man in Katanga. It reported the
Sharpeville Massacre and the Rivonia Trials. The names of Walter Sisulu, Nelson
Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Sobukwe were known to WIG’s readers – freedom
fighters labelled by the British national broadsheets as troublemakers at best
and terrorists by definition. There was no louder voice than WIG’s on
Commonwealth issues or on decolonisation.”[16]
In other words, it was not a black-nationalist
paper, but a progressive paper that sided with the struggles of the proletariat
at the national level and with the anti-imperialist struggles internationally.
In the summer of 1958, only five months after the
first issue of the West Indian Gazette appeared, the racist ideology being
promoted by the media and the various bourgeois political parties erupted into
riots, first in Nottingham and then in Notting Hill, in areas with large black
populations, but where the poor, both black and white, were crowded into
substandard accommodation.
In Notting Hill, the riots broke out on 30 August
1958, arising out of taunts made by white lumpen elements to a mixed-race
couple. Egged on by Oswald Moseley’s fascist ‘Union movement’ and other racist
organisations, crowds would gather in the area to shout slogans such as “Let’s
find another nigger.” PC Michael Leach wrote: “There were several
hundred people, all white, congregated about the footway and … shouting
obscene remarks like, ‘We will get the black bastards’.”[17]
Thus mobilised, disaffected white youth set out to
attack defenceless black people, who, in their turn, formed self-defence groups
and fought back. Although the main riots ended on 5 September, the situation
was tense for several months and on 17 May the following year, a young black
student, Kelso Cochrane from the Caribbean island of St Vincent, was murdered
by a gang of six white youths, who were never caught or brought to trial.
The riots, according to Carter, “changed the way
we saw ourselves. We had been used to the everyday verbal abuse in the streets,
in shops, factories and on the buses; teddy boys used to pick fights, but we
did not fear for our lives or think that our houses could be burned down.” [18]
In these circumstances, the West Indian Gazette
came into its own, as a campaigning tool supporting those organising self
defence and anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, raising money for the
defence of both black and white youths who were being prosecuted for putting up
resistance to fascist violence.
Claudia Jones and Manchanda became founder members
of a broad organisation designed to unite all those who could be united against
racist violence and the institutionalised racism of the British state
apparatus. The organisation in question was the Association for the Advancement
of Coloured People which was “modelled by its founder, Amy Ashwood Garvey, on
her US experience with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People”. (Sherwood, p.92)
The organisation was broad enough to include
various petty-bourgeois elements, who were earnest in their desire to promote
its aims, including such establishment figures as David Pitt (subsequently made
a life peer) and Fenner Brockway MP, who were both members of the Labour Party.
Following the murder of Kelso Cochrane, the organisation was broadened still
further and became the Inter-Racial Friendship Co-ordinating Council, of which
Claudia Jones became co-Vice Chair, while Manchanda undertook secretarial
duties.
Subsequently, the British bourgeoisie ‘responded’
to the riots with proposals to limit black immigration into the UK that
ultimately culminated into the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962,
the first of a whole series of enactments that continue to this day, promoted
by Labour as much as by the Tories, to create the impression that the problems
faced by the working class of unemployment, poor housing, poor schooling, poor
health care, etc, are caused by black immigration and can be alleviated by
halting it.
The West Indian Gazette campaigned vigorously
against these racist laws, exposing the hypocrisy of the Tory and Labour
politicians who supported them, tirelessly organising demonstrations and
pickets. Although all this work was not able to free Britain from racist
legislation, it cannot be denied that the consciousness-raising that it brought
about was fundamental to the eventual passing of the Race Relations Act 1976,
which Fenner Brockway had been sponsoring for many years before it was finally
treated seriously, and which has, notwithstanding its many weaknesses, played
an important part in reducing the injustice meted out to people on the basis of
their race.
Carnival
The Notting Hill Carnival arose out of all the
activity surrounding the response to the Notting Hill riots. Claudia Jones was
very much its moving spirit. She saw it as a way of putting people back in
touch with their cultural traditions, reminding them of all they had to be
proud of, while at the same time extending the hand of friendship to white
people by sharing this joyous culture with them.
Not only did she organise the first carnival – an
indoor event at St Pancras Town Hall – but she also arranged for it to be
televised and broadcast to the nation. Again, the West Indian Gazette was
invaluable for ensuring the success of this event – for its interest in Caribbean artistic developments, for making the necessary contacts, and for making sure it
was packed out.
While Claudia was alive, Carnival continued to be
an indoor event, but ultimately moved outdoors to Notting Hill to join
traditional British celebrations that had been held there on the August bank
holidays. So popular were the Caribbean contributions that it was not long
before the Notting Hill Carnival became the celebration of Caribbean culture
enjoyed not only by people of Caribbean background but by all sections of
British society.
Conclusion
Because she was a communist, Claudia Jones could
not be hurt by white racism. Her attitude would be that, as a communist, her
duty was to do all in her power to help white people overcome the prejudices
that tied them to their exploiters and oppressors, the common enemy of white
and black proletarians alike. For this reason, she could never have been
seduced by the siren songs of black nationalism, as the record of her political
activity proves.
Claudia fully understood the class basis of racism,
and, not only that, she realised why this racism was festering among the
working class, fostered by the labour aristocracy: “These artificial
divisions and antagonisms between British and colonial workers, already costly
in toll of generations of colonial wars and ever-recurrent crises, have delayed
fundamental social change in Britain, and form the very basis of colour
prejudice. The small top section of the working class, bribed and corrupted,
and benefiting from this colonial robbery, have been imbued with this racist
‘white superiority’ poison.” (Caribbean community in Britain,
reproduced in Johnson, p.144)
Claudia was a loyal communist with a deep
understanding of Marxism Leninism: a born organiser and an indomitable spirit,
and we in Britain are extremely lucky to have had her among us for the last
nine years of her life. Her spirit and commitment are an example to us all,
when we remember that she would get up out of her hospital bed to attend
political meetings and then return to it.
Let us remember Claudia, pay homage to her, and
strive to follow the example that she set in literally giving her life to the
movement, thereby living forever in the hearts and minds of progressive people
the world over.
NOTES
1. Speech by Claudia Jones at the
Hotel Theresa, New York, 21 February 1952.
2. To quote blackpast.org, “The
Scottsboro Boys were nine young black men, falsely accused of raping two white
women on board a train near Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. Convicted and facing
execution, the case of Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen
Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, and Andrew and
Leroy Wright sparked international demonstrations and succeeded in both
highlighting the racism of the American legal system and in overturning the
conviction.
“On 25 March 1931, nine unemployed
young black men, illegally riding the rails and looking for work, were taken
off a freight train at Scottsboro, Alabama and held on a minor charge. The
Scottsboro deputies found two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, and
pressured them into accusing the nine youths of raping them on board the train.
The charge of raping white women was an explosive accusation, and within two
weeks the Scottsboro Boys were convicted and eight sentenced to death, the
youngest, Leroy Wright at age 13, to life imprisonment.
“The American Communist Party (CP),
in this period at the height of its organising focus in the American South against
racism and economic exploitation, immediately took the case on, and largely
through activist efforts, sparked a mass defence movement. The CP brought in
their legal arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD) to represent the nine.
After two trials in which an all-white jury, fuelled by a biased Alabama press, convicted the nine, the ILD and the CP began a national protest campaign to
overturn the conviction, marked by numerous street marches, national and
international speaking tours, and popular songs. Because of their principled
leadership in the campaign, the CP gained much widespread respect among African
Americans and civil-rights activists. When they travelled to Washington DC to demonstrate, the CP stopped at segregated restaurants to stage sit-ins against
discrimination, helping to turn the campaign into a trial of the system of
segregation and racism in America, presaging the sit-in tactics of the 1960s
civil-rights movement.
“Although initially hostile to the
Communists and wary of being involved in the touchy issue of black men raping
white women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) ultimately joined with the CP and other civil rights organisations to
form the Scottsboro Defense Committee. Eventually, one of the white women, Ruby
Bates, came forward to repudiate her testimony, acknowledging that she and
Price had been pressured into falsely accusing the Scottsboro Boys, and she
became part of the campaign to save their lives.
“The case went to the United States Supreme Court in 1937, and the lives of the nine were saved, though it was
almost 20 years before the last defendant was freed from prison. The trial of
the Scottsboro Boys is perhaps one of the proudest moments of American
radicalism, in which a mass movement of blacks and whites – led by Communists
and radicals – successfully beat the Jim Crow legal system.”
3. Carole Boyce Davies, Left of
Karl Marx, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007.
4. Jim Crow laws were segregation laws
enacted particularly in the southern states of America under the slogan
‘Separate but equal’. In fact, they were separate and unequal, of course. It
was possible to pass these laws in the southern states, notwithstanding a
majority black population, because of laws that disenfranchised those unable to
pay a poll tax, or unable to read, etc. The laws passed, therefore, reflected
the attitudes of the white middle class in those states.
5. Trevor Carter, Shattering
Illusions, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1986.
6. Buzz Johnson, ‘I Think of My
Mother’, Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones, Karia Press, London, 1985.
7. Eric Levy (see Note 8 below)
remembers that Claudia’s peace activism was not of a bourgeois pacifist
variety. She strongly held the view that as long as the imperialist powers had
atomic weapons, then all other countries were entitled to have them as well,
that being the best guarantee of peace.
8. Cited in Marika Sherwood, Claudia
Jones, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1999, p73.
9. Mikki Doyle, a CPGB stalwart,
apparently had access to Claudia’s possessions at some point between the time
when Claudia died on 25 December 1964 and the emergency grant of Letters of
Administration to Claudia’s close friend Abhimanyu Manchanda on 13 January
1965. Clearly, if the journal was critical of the CPGB, Mrs Doyle had every
reason to destroy it to prevent Manchanda using it against the CPGB. Indeed,
one suspects that she would have considered it her duty to do so in defence of
her party’s interests.
Suggestions have been made that Manchanda himself might have
destroyed it because it may have contained details of differences Claudia may
have had with him, but this seems quite improbable, since, if he had control of
the document, he had no need to destroy it as there was no danger of it being
used against him.
10. Ivor Kenna, at the Stalin Society
meeting at which this presentation was made, drew attention to the details
given in Sherwood, pp74-75, of struggle at the 1957 Congress of the CPGB over
references in party literature to “helping backward peoples” (by which
was meant the populations of oppressed countries), for, as Claudia Jones
pointed out at this congress, “the anti-imperialist struggles of the
backward Afro-Asian nations, from Egypt to Ghana, are today leading the
progressive anti-imperialist struggle”
11. Boyce Jones claims that Claudia was
not a Stalinist because she did not write any articles supporting “Stalinist
positions”. It is far more significant, however, that, following Khrushchev’s
secret speech condemning Stalin, Claudia never joined the ranks of those who
rushed to echo Khrushchev’s malign accusations.
12. From an untitled and unpublished
draft report made to the Committee of Asian and Afro-Caribbean Organisations,
found among the papers of Claudia Jones inherited by Diane Langford on the
death of Manchanda. Carole Boyce Davies has deposited all the Claudia Jones
papers held by Diane Langford with the Schomburg Library in New York where it
is entitled ‘The Claudia Jones Memorial Collection’.
13. At the Stalin Society meeting at
which this presentation was made, another speaker, Eric Levy, who knew Claudia
Jones personally, lived in another flat in the same building, and was the
person who found her body by climbing in through a window of her apartment when
she failed to meet up with him as had been arranged, confirmed that Claudia
Jones was an ardent admirer of Cde Mao Zedong.
14. Quoted in Carter, pp70-71. Carter
claims that he has borrowed this quotation from Johnson, but he is mistaken on
this.
15. Quoted in Carter, p62.
16. ‘The West Indian Gazette: Claudia
Jones and the black press in Britain’ by Donald Hinds, Race and Class, July
2008.
17. According to a statement made at
the time of the riots by Police Constable Michael Leach, based in Notting Hill,
quoted in ‘The Home Office cover-up of Notting Hill’s race riots’ by Ian
Burrell, The Independent, 23 August 2003.
18. Carter, p66