Claudia Jones (1915-1964)

July 24, 2007

Claudia Jones|

With the birth name of Claudia Cumberbatch, Claudia Jones was born on February 21, 1915 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Her family migrated to the United States in 1924 and became residents of Harlem, New York. Claudia’s mother was a garment worker and due to the effects of harsh working conditions and overwork, she died when Claudia was twelve years old. Ultimately poverty overcame the family and young Claudia eventually dropped out of high school.

While Jones’s formal education came to an end, her actual education did not terminate. Instead she found a political education in social activism. At the age of 18, Jones became a member of the Young Communist League (YCL). It was at this juncture that Jones became involved in the international movement to defend the Scottsboro Boys. Charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young African American men faced execution in the form of legalized lynching. Jones wrote on the behalf of the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense as a journalist for the YCL journal Weekly Review. Later she wrote for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily World.

Claudia Jones was a Communist for her entire adult life and a leader in several major movements that marked the twentieth century. These included: the African American liberation movement in the United States, the international Communist movement, the struggle for the rights of women, the battle for world peace, and the Caribbean fight for independence and unity.

Jones’s consistent stand against exploitation and oppression and her advocacy of socialism and world peace did not go unnoticed by the United States Government during the McCarthy era. Jones was arrested in 1948 and incarcerated for six months. She was arrested again in 1955 and subsequently sent to Federal prison. Since she never gained U.S. citizenship, Jones was deported from the United States to England where she immediately became involved in the various struggles of the West Indian community and other nationally oppressed groups. Claudia Jones died on Christmas Day, 1964. Quite fittingly Claudia Jones is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to the grave of Karl Marx.

Author Profile

John H. McClendon III

Dr. John H. McClendon III, is Director of African American and African Studies and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Black Studies and Political Science from Central State University and a Master’s and doctorate in philosophy from the University of Kansas. McClendon has taught at State University of New York at Binghamton, University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana, Eastern Illinois University, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Bates College. McClendon’s areas of expertise include African philosophy, Philosophy of African American Studies, Marxist philosophy, and the history of African American philosophers.

He is the author of C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism (Lexington Books 2005) and several monographs, reports, booklets and articles in noted anthologies. He has published widely in a number of journals including Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Socialism and Democracy, The AME Church Review, Explorations in Ethnic Studies, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, Freedomways, American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, and Ethnic Studies Review among others. He is currently the Editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter Philosophy and the Black Experience, he serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Cultural Logic and is an Ex Officio Member of the Committee on Blacks in Philosophy—American Philosophical Association. McClendon has lectured widely throughout the country and abroad including in Toulouse, France and at the University of Havana in Cuba. Most recently this year, he was the keynote speaker for Black History Month at Mississippi State University, the Charles Phelps Taft lecturer for the 35th anniversary of the African-American Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati and served as a faculty member for the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute.

Categories:
African American History People

Tags:
20th Century (1900-1999) Civil Rights Activists Europe - Great Britain - England Gender - Women North America-Trinidad and Tobago Occupation-Journalist Political Activists - Radicals and Marxists United States - Alabama United States - New York Women's Rights Advocates

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CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

McClendon III, J. (2007, July 24). Claudia Jones (1915-1964). BlackPast.org. https://new.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-claudia-1915-1964/

Source of the Author's Information:

Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Claudia Jones, Ben Davis, Fighter for Freedom (New York: New Century Publishers, 1954); Claudia Jones, “The Caribbean Community in Britain,” Freedomways V. 4 (Summer 1964), 341-57; John H. McClendon III, “Claudia Jones (1915-1964) political activist, black nationalist, feminist, journalist” in Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book II (New York: Gale Research Inc., 1996), 343-348.