Claudia Jones, a revolutionary Black communist

This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2020. The lessons here are worth reprinting, revisiting, relearning every year.

It was out of my Jim Crow  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. - Claudia Jones

One of the biggest lies the capitalists have ever tried to teach generations of working-class people is that Black workers did not play a critical role in communist history. This is because the bosses will ALWAYS try to perpetuate the idea that workers should remain divided by race. However, we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) know that multiracial unity has ALWAYS been the most effective way for workers to overcome the effects of racial exploitation and oppression. Claudia Jones, a Black female leading member of the Communist Party (CP) for decades, represents the heroic efforts in fighting racism and sexism from the 1930s to 1960s, just as her politics also point toward the weaknesses embedded in the strategy of international communism many years ago. The main weakness in the old communist movement that is evident through looking at Claudia Jones is that they did not understand the need for one international party LED by women and Black and Latin workers to unite and fight directly to overthrow capitalism and establish a communist workers’ state.
Formation as a communist
Like thousands of other workers in the early 1900s, Jones and her family emigrated to New York City from Trinidad in the Caribbean. Jones was an avid student and started writing early on. She had dreams of college, but as a daughter of a garment worker who died too young, she started working herself at a young age. The revolutionary vision and struggle of the communist movement appealed to her, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League and became active in the movement to defend the Scottsboro 9, a group of Black teenagers, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
A multiracial, communist-led movement turned the  “Scottsboro Boys” into an international cause for millions of workers all over the world to win their freedom. But just as the communist movement was at its sharpest point of winning workers around the world to workers’ revolution, they began to retreat politically into a “popular front against fascism” and Claudia Jones became part of that larger retreat.
Leadership in the Communist Party USA & fascist McCarthyism
In 1937, Jones joined the editorial staff of the communist Daily Worker, rising by 1938 to become editor of the Weekly Review. After World War II, Jones became executive secretary of the Women’s National Commission, and secretary for the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs, a CPUSA journal. However, if anti-racism and internationalism had been the central premise of the CP’s strategy, they would not have had the need for a separate journal to address “Negro Affairs,” because all affairs of the working-class are touched by racist capitalism and super-exploitation.
Despite the shortcomings of the party’s line, Jones organized women workers and gave leadership within the Communist Party USA on the ways super-exploitation of women could become central to the Party’s theoretical development. She is perhaps best known for her seminal essay appearing in Political Affairs, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”  in which she took to task liberals, progressives and her own Party for not sufficiently recognizing the super-exploitation of Black women under capitalism and their leadership in working-class struggles, writing:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

In 1948, Jones, along with several other leaders of the Communist Party USA, was charged for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the next seven years, the federal government  convicted, imprisoned in Ellis Island, and ultimately deported Jones—but not without an international movement launched to free her and thousands of other communist and progressive working-class organizers imprisoned during the fascism of the McCarthy period.
Fighting British racism & imperialism
Following WWII, Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom increased and Black and Asian immigrant workers faced brutal racism upon arrival. Signs reading “No Irish, No Coloured, No Dogs” littered the streets of London businesses and apartment buildings for rent. Attacks on Black youth by white mobs and police officers were common. Working in London in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jones, a lifelong communist and self-described Marxist-Leninist, tirelessly organized several anti-racist, anti-imperialist campaigns.
Realizing the importance of celebrating working-class culture, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, a popular newspaper that built a base among Caribbean diaspora workers in Britain and back home, with a circulation of 15,000. In 1958, following the killings of Black youths and riots instigated by racist white mobs in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, Jones and others organized a carnival in response to the violence as a means of unifying the Black Caribbean community.
Claudia Jones died in December 1964, her health gutted by the years of political persecution and incarceration in the U.S. Her legacy was immediately felt by working-class communities around the world and condolences poured in, from W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Amy Ashwood Garvey to Mao Zedong, whom Jones had met on a delegation to China. Claudia Jones remains an example of how the leadership of Black workers, especially Black women, is key to the future of building a communist society. Paul Robeson expressed his admiration for Jones thusly:

It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women.

It is fitting that Jones is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London. Following her deportation, Jones wrote:

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, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights...

As communists we should all be that thorn in the side of capitalism—so sharp as to make it bleed.