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Who is Claudia Jones? 
Julie-Ann McCausland 

 

Introduction 

Claudia Vera Jones née Cumberbatch, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist who, 

at eight years old, migrated to the United States from Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the British West 

Indies (Boyce Davies 159). Jones’ mother and father had arrived in the United States two years 

earlier, in 1922, when their economic circumstances had worsened as a result of the drop in the 

cocoa trade, which had impoverished the West Indies and the entire Caribbean (Boyce Davies 

159). Like many Black people who migrated from the West Indies, Jones’ parents hoped to find 

fortunes in the United States, where ‘‘gold was to be found on the streets’’ and the dreams of 

rearing one’s children in a ‘‘free America’’ were said to be realized (Boyce Davies 159). However, 

the lie of the American dream was soon revealed, as Jones, her three sisters and her parents suffered 

exploitation and indignity at the hands of the white families and from the legacy of Jim Crow 

national policy (Boyce Davies 159). 

Jones attended Wadleigh High School where she was active in the Junior National 

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Two years before she graduated 

high school, Jones’ mother died of spinal meningitis at the age of thirty-seven (Boyce Davies xxiv). 

Later, Jones was committed to Sea View Sanatorium for almost a year after having been diagnosed 

with tuberculosis (Boyce Davies xxiv). After graduating high school, Jones gained employment in 

a laundry, a factory, a millinery and in sales (Boyce Davies xxiv). This is significant, because, 

presumably, her experience from working in these environments contributed to the development 

of her political thinking. As Carol Bryce notes, Claudia Jones was involved in the Scottsboro Boys’ 

organizing, and she wrote ‘‘Claudia’s Comments’’ for a Black newspaper that she subsequently 

became the editor of (Boyce Davies xxiv). The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American 

teenagers who were falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931. 

Jones wrote on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense as a Journalist for the Young 

Communist League journal, the “Weekly Review” (McClendon).  

In 1936, Jones joined the Communist Party and Young Communist League, where she was 

assigned to the Youth Movement wing. After several promotions, she eventually became the 

Educational Director of the Young Communist League, where she was tasked by Party to work 

with working-class and Black women for peace and equality. It was during this period that she 

filed preliminary papers for U.S. Citizenship (Boyce Davies xxiv). In 1947, she was arrested for 

the first time and imprisoned on Ellis Island under the 1918 Immigration Act. This Act stated that 

the United States would exclude and expel from the country, aliens who were members of the 

anarchistic and similar classes (Boyce Davies 2008, xxiv). Jones was arrested under this Act 

because she was not a Citizen of the United States. She was later released on $1000 bail and 

threatened with deportation to her native country of Trinidad if she did not modify her persistent 

stand against exploitation and the oppression of Black women in the United States (Boyce Davies 

xxiv). In this period, she toured forty-three U.S. states, covering the west coast, reorganizing state-

level women’s commissions, recruiting new party members, and organizing mass rallies. After 

several arrests at the height of her struggle for the freedom of exploited Black women, and during 

the McCarthy era, she was declared un-American in 1955 and deported to Britain, as she was 

considered a subject of the British Empire (Boyce Davies xxiv).  



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Who is Claudia Jones? 

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In London, she was welcomed by friends and Communist Party members, including other 

communist deportees from the United States. Soon she became affiliated with Caribbean members 

of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) (Boyce Davies xxiv). She also joined the West 

Indian Forum and Committee on Racism and International Affairs and worked in various 

organizations in London, including the Caribbean Labour Congress (London Branch) (Boyce 

Davies xxiv). She later founded the West Indian Gazette (later, West Indian Gazette and Afro-

Asian Caribbean News) in London, was involved in the political organizing of Caribbean, Pan-

African, and third-world communities in London and helped to organize the city’s first Caribbean 

Carnival at St. Pancras Hall. Jones also worked with the African National Congress to organize 

hunger strikes against apartheid. Additionally, she organized boycotts of South Africa for the 

freedom of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela. She met Martin Luther King Jr. in London 

when he was on his way to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize and gave a speech in Japan as a 

delegate to the 10th World Conference against Hydrogen and Atom Bombs (Boyce Davies xxiv). 

Essentially, Claudia Jones was an influential and popular public figure, an active journalist and 

public speaker, a close friend of many influential people, including W.E.B. Du Bois, and Amy 

Ashwood Garvey, who was the female political and intellectual equivalent of C. L. R. James 

(Boyce Davies 2).1  

During Jones’ years in the United States and Britain, she was vocal in her belief that peace 

could not be attained if women, especially poor women, were excluded from the conversation. She 

challenged the Communist Party to take a more serious interest in the cause of Black women 

(Boyce Davies 40). She died in London, England at the age of 49(Boyce Davies 2008, xxiv). Her 

funeral drew recognition from people and governments around the world. This recognition 

included diplomatic representations and media coverage (Boyce Davies 2008, xxiv). Jones’ ashes 

were interred in a plot of land that is located left of the grave of Karl Marx in the Highgate 

Cemetery, London (Boyce Davies xxiv). 

With this background in mind, I focus my discussions in this paper on two themes: a) Claudia 

Jones’ contribution to expanding Marxist thought to incorporate race and gender into its class 

analysis and b) the impact of her lived experiences in shaping the development of her political 

thinking. Carol Boyce Davies’ biography of Claudia Jones is very strong in that it provides 

extensive details as to who Claudia Jones was and how instrumental her advocacy was for Black 

women. However, a weakness I found in the biography is that Boyce Davies did not discuss why 

Jones’ contributions remain largely underappreciated and why Jones remains relatively unknown 

to many in the Afro-Caribbean culture. I will argue that Claudia Jones’ contributions are 

undervalued because she is constructed as lacking credibility by virtue of being a female. Claudia 

Jones was a valiant fighter against racism and imperialism who dedicated her life to the progress 

of socialism and the liberation of Black people.  

How has the work of Claudia Jones contributed to expanding Marxist thought to incorporate 

race and gender into its class analysis?  

Jones was often considered more radical than Marx because she did not believe that capitalism 

was the only factor contributing to sexism and racism (Edmonds). For Jones, gender was also a 

significant contributor to the oppression that Black people, and specifically Black women, face in 

the United States. Marx provided a theory of society in which it would progress through a mode 
                                                           
1 Conspicuously, like Jones, Amy Ashwood Garvey remains outside the pool of knowledge of Caribbean intellectual 

history (Boyce Davies 20082). 



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of production and class conflicts between the proletariat, the workers and the bourgeoisie. 

However, he did not account for race and gender or for the position of Black women in society. 

Claudia Jones advanced Marx’s ideology by expanding it to consider the issues of colonialism, 

imperialism and an analysis of women in society (Boyce Davies 219). According to Boyce Davies, 

Jones’s position is read by some as being informed largely by Communist Party literature, 

indoctrination and idealism; however, Jones’ position was in part influenced by her vast 

knowledge of Leninism (Boyce Davies 221). Leninism is derived from the ideology of Vladimir 

Lenin, a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who had taken a position on what 

was then called ‘‘the woman question,’’ asserting that ‘‘we must create a powerful international 

women’s movement, on a clear theoretical basis’’ (Boyce Davies 3). 

Building on Lenin’s ideology, Jones supported the creation of a subcommittee within the 

Communist Party to address the woman question (Boyce Davies 51). She did this by insisting on 

the development, in the party, of theoretical training for women comrades, the organization of 

women into mass organizations, daytime classes for women, and "babysitter" funds to allow 

women's activism. While Boyce Davies did not definitively define the notion of the ‘the woman 

question,’ I understand from her discussion that the concept refers to the status of women in society 

and our involvement in feminist movements for social change (Boyce Davies 2008). Nevertheless, 

though Jones was well read in Leninism and recognized that Lenin had advanced views on the 

colonial question, she was also cognizant that Lenin spoke only of the enslavement of women 

within the social and economic structures that restrict them to domestic labour (Boyce Davies 3). 

Lenin was therefore speaking of a particular type of woman: the white woman. Jones recognized 

that this general position did not account for the specificities of any group of women, as it spoke 

of women generally and did not take into consideration that Black women at that time were already 

located in a super-exploitative condition within the given productive labour sectors (Boyce Davies 

3). This is the analytical space in which Claudia Jones began to contribute not only to expanding 

Marxist thought, but also Leninist thinking, while at the same time providing intellectual 

leadership from which scholars of Black women’s social and political history and condition in 

various societies could learn and contribute to (Boyce Davies 3). 

Claudia Jones’ best contribution to Black feminist thought entailed her theorizing of the 

super-exploitation of the Black woman. The concept rests solidly on Claudia’s observation that 

Black women— ‘‘as workers, as Negroes, as women’’—were ‘‘the most oppressed stratum of the 

whole population’’ (Boyce Davies 12). For Jones, ‘‘Capitalists exploit woman doubly, both as 

workers and women. Woman has to face special oppression in every field in capitalist society—

as a worker—a wife, a homebuilder and a citizen” (Boyce Davies 40). While most of her theory 

was put to paper in ‘‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,’’ Jones also wrote 

on the subject in her column on women’s issues for The Daily Worker, titled ‘‘Half the World’’ 

(Boyce Davies 40). This was a column that made its position clear in its title: in representing 

women, we are, indeed, representing “half the world” (Boyce Davies 40). Further, Jones’ 

courtroom speech after her sentencing was explicit in making her philosophical and ideological 

positions clear publicly and officially (Boyce Davies 219). Her speech was not a plea for leniency, 

but a demonstration that Black women were also thinkers, held ideological positions, and could 

assert themselves; it was also a demonstration of her work in women’s activism and her 

involvement in a political struggle. She knew she was going to be sentenced but continued to let 

her voice be heard. She refused to back down from her advocacy (Boyce Davies 219). 



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Who is Claudia Jones? 

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Marx’s development of his theory on the mode of production and the working-class is useful 

for intellectuals who study political thought, but Claudia Jones was someone who worked outside 

of an academic context, and her entire production of ideas rivaled many of those produced in the 

universities at the same time (Boyce Davies 10). That is, Claudia Jones’ praxis was far more 

critical, especially for Black people, as she combined theory and practice: she did transformative, 

“on the ground” work in addition to developing theory. Her intellectual contribution is particularly 

important since many Black communities did not have access to academic institutions before the 

civil rights era (Boyce Davies 10). Jones shows, by her example, a way of maintaining her political 

positions and affiliations and of advancing others beyond Marx’s theoretical positionings. She 

benefitted from Lenin’s advances on the issue of imperialism and the national/colonial issue, as 

well as the woman question (Boyce Davies 67). While being an avowed Marxist-Leninist, she 

continued to assert the importance of Black women as an analytical category, subject to society’s 

‘‘super-exploitation,’’ but still active, with potential for leadership, and by her example, also 

thinkers. Her ability to link race, gender, geography and labour in the context of the position of 

Black women internationally, along with her internationalist, anti-imperialist approach, provided 

a more advanced reading than Marx of both the conditions of and the possibilities for resistance 

by Black women under imperialism (Boyce Davies 67). 

How did the lived experiences of Claudia Jones shape the development of her political 

thinking? 

According to Boyce Davies, Claudia Jones’ anti-imperialist feminist, socialism stems from her 

background: Caribbean in geographic and cultural identification and anti-imperialist in orientation. 

She linked labour to Black identity and women’s rights (Boyce Davies 67). Additionally, Claudia 

Jones’ political thinking and activism were also shaped by her affinity to other Black Caribbean 

feminisms, for example, Elma Francois’ feminism. Elma Francois was a political activist from 

Trinidad and Tobago who, in February 1938, became the first woman in the history of Trinidad 

and Tobago to be tried for sedition (Boyce Davies 67). According to Boyce Davies, at the trial, 

“Francois, unlike other defendants, undertook the greater part of her own defence herself” and her 

speech was very similar to Jones’ speech before Judge Dimock, in that the speech revealed a series 

of internationalist/Pan-Africanist views similar to those that Jones espoused (Boyce Davies 2008, 

67). For example, when asked to define “world imperialism and colonialism,” Francois “described 

the relationship between the ruling classes of the world and the exploited workers of the colonies” 

(Boyce Davies 67). Claudia Jones shared many similar positions on women’s activism and 

involvement in political struggle (Boyce Davies 67). For scholars in the Caribbean, one of the 

distinctive features of Caribbean feminism is its anti-imperialist, labour orientation, which sees 

women’s economic rights as central to any fulfillment of their human rights in general (Boyce 

Davies 67). Hence, Jones identifying with Francois might have been central to the development of 

her thinking and understanding of Caribbean feminism. 

Another significant experience of Claudia Jones that shaped the development of her political 

thinking was her exile from the United States, which she details in the piece titled “Ship’s Log,” 

which she wrote for her father aboard the Queen Elizabeth ship (Boyce Davies 157). In this piece, 

Jones refers to her condition as ‘‘my exile for my independent political ideas’’ and to the United 

States as the ‘‘land I belong to and know and its people with whom I have worked and struggled 

for social progress’’ (Boyce Davies 157). In the basic dictionary definition, an exile is one who is 

separated from his or her own country, often as a result of banishment (Boyce Davies 157). The 



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word “deportation” overlaps with “exile” in that it refers to “the lawful expulsion of an undesired 

alien or other person from a state or [incomplete quote]” (Boyce Davies 157). 

Ultimately, Jones turned the pain of being imprisoned and later exiled into a positive 

emotion, turning the “ship of exile” into a vehicle that would take her to “marvelous places” 

(Boyce Davies 157). In so doing, she transformed her punishment into an opportunity to carry her 

activism even further into the diaspora. 

Why are her contributions underappreciated today? 

Claudia Jones’ contributions to our struggle and the struggles of all oppressed people is one of the 

most outstanding contributions of a Black Communist. While Jones did not use the word 

“intersectionality” in her praxis, it is hard not to notice her ideas of equality and intersectionality 

as she linked race, gender, geography and labour in the context of the situation of Black women 

internationally (Boyce Davies 67). Jones remains largely unknown, unrecognized and 

underappreciated today, and she seems to have simply disappeared from major consideration in 

histories of Black anti-imperialist work and Black transnational feminism. In retrospect, I am 

reminded of the 19th century political locution, “Ain’t I a Woman” by Sojourner Truth, a formerly 

enslaved Black woman who fundamentally challenged the dominant notions of “woman” and 

opened a discussion about the concept of intersectionality (Brah and Phoenix 46). Like Jones, 

Sojourner Truth did not coin or use the term intersectionality, but her discussions of what it means 

to be a woman under different circumstances has been the subject of many debates, especially as 

it relates to the concept of global sisterhood (Brah and Phoenix 46). Essentially, like Sojourner 

Truth, Jones’ intellectual contributions have been overlooked from Black History.  

I have been thinking of Jones through the concept of the “gender wars” because credibility 

is such a foundational power in those wars and because women are so often accused of being 

categorically lacking in this department (Solnit 104). Not uncommonly, when a Black woman says 

something that impugns a white man or an institution, especially powerful ones, the response often 

questions not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so (Solnit 

104). On this final note, Jones’ stunning achievements in the era of men such as Martin Luther 

King Jr., Normal Manley and Cheddi Jagan, to name a few, paled because she was a woman and 

one of Caribbean origins; because of this, she continues to be dismissed, erased and silenced. We 

still exist in a white hegemonic world where Caribbean women and, by extension, Black women 

and girls are devalued.  

  



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Who is Claudia Jones? 

85 
 

Works Cited 

Brah, Avtar & Phoenix, Ann. (2004/2013). Supplement 4 – Adapted from Activist Insight: Sojouner 

Truth (1797-1883). Gender and Women’s Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain.  

Davies, Carole Boyce. (2008). Left of Karl Marx: The political life of Black communist Claudia 

Jones. Duke University Press.  

McClendon III, J. (2007). Claudia Jones (1915-1964). Retrieved from 

https://www.Blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-claudia-1915-1964/  

Solnit, Rebecca. (2014). "Cassandra Among the Creeps." (From Men Explain Things To Me. 

Chicago: Haymarket Books): Harper's Magazine; New York Vol. 329, Iss. 1973. 4-9.  

 

 

 


