A dedicated grassroots community leader active on both sides of the Atlantic, and a black woman no less, Claudia Jones captivated an audience of 14,000 in New York’s Madison Square Garden in the mid-1940s, an era which preceded the modern civil rights movement and followed women’s suffrage. In Britain, she set up one of the earliest black newspapers, the West Indian Gazette, and among her many campaigns, she organised the week-long hunger strike tent for the Free Mandela movement at St Martin in the Fields in the early 1960s.

What Claudia witnessed clearly paved her path. Her family emigrated from the then British colony of Trinidad following economic unrest and mass upsurges in the city of Port of Spain where unemployed workers’ councils were growing. There was a mounting consciousness particularly amid the Trinidadians through the Garvey Movement which, rightfully, was a cause of concern for European and American colonial powers. A few years after their arrival in Harlem, New York City, when Claudia was just 12 years old, her mother collapsed over a sewing machine in a factory, dying out of sheer exhaustion. As a teenager, she had to abandon further education and contracted tuberculosis due to poor living and working conditions, and this plagued her with ill health for the rest of her life. At the same time, she began to observe the systematic discrimination taking place around her, and was especially affected by the Scottsboro Boys trial of Alabama between 1931 and 1937 in which nine African-Americans were falsely accused of raping two white women. She also closely followed Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia and Eritrea) and its closer alignment with Nazi Germany.

Claudia sought a radical political force to combat the social issues being faced by black communities during the Depression: the least paid, least educated, highest mortality and most imprisoned. She found this in the Communist Party. During this period, the Communist Party in Harlem was carrying out strong work in the social sphere, stepping in to stop evictions by white landlords and leading high profile legal-political cases in relation to the incrimination of black men in the south. As such, Claudia Jones joined the youth league swiftly rising to become the “negro affairs” editor for the Daily Worker newspaper and a regular speaker addressing the issues of working-class women. Poet and activist Elean Thomas comments in a 1989 edition of Spare Rib magazine: “She did not seek to compartmentalise human beings or see social activities as merely another method of politicity – but as a natural human interest.”

The FBI spent more than ten years spying on Claudia Jones. She was arrested on a deportation warrant in 1948, and again, under the McCarran Act in 1950, charged with being a communist “alien” (non-US citizen). In a letter she addressed to her friend John, she describes activism within the confines of Ellis Island with a vivacious pride: “There are trade unionists and maritime industries, who smile their firm greetings of approval when, from shops and locals, wires or letters come, telling of actions taken on behalf of American liberty.” Moreover, she petitioned the United Nations with fellow detainees, asserting, “Our freedom of conscience [has been] violated and our right to think outlawed.”

This Orwellian feeling is reiterated in an extraordinary court speech in 1953 when she is accused, this time under the Smith Act, with the ludicrous charge of advocating the overthrow of the US government. She appeals to judge and jury:

“The thinking process, as your honour well knows, is a process that defies jailing. When it is all boiled down what shows is not the strength of the policies and practices of our prosecutors – which are akin to police state practices – but their desperate fear of the people. Nothing shows this more, your honour, than our exposure of the biased jury drawn from a system which virtually excludes Negro, Puerto Rican and manual workers. This virtual exclusion exists not because of a lack of qualifications or even financial hardship, but because of deliberate discrimination based on consciously cultivated white supremacist ruling class prejudice which sullies our boasted western culture.”

Eventually, in 1955, the courts ruled that Claudia needed to be deported under the McCarran Law. Her country of origin would not take her, petrified of the power she would have on the small island. So Britain had no choice but to accept her as a colonial subject. After 33 years in America, ejected by a superpower frightened by this one woman’s courage, she left for Britain penniless and alone.