Lesser-spotted Comrades - Claudia Jones
By Jess Spear
Article originally published in Issue 2 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
“The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason.”
Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in Trinidad and Tobago on 21 February 1915. She moved to Harlem, New York at an early age and eventually got involved in the Junior National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and organising for justice for the nine Scottsboro Boys -- who were falsely accused of raping 2 white women and found guilty by an all-white jury. She joined the Young Communist League in 1936, and as a professional journalist subsequently found a role writing numerous communist party publications, including a regular column in the Daily Worker called ‘Half the World’ focused on educating and organising women.
Yet it was the oppression of black women on which Claudia Jones shined the brightest spotlight. Her most well known essay published in 1949, ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!’ theorises the particular revolutionary potential of black women as rooted in their triple oppression as black women workers and the history of their brutal enslavement and subsequent subordination to black men after emancipation. She describes how black women are super-exploited, earning not only far less than men, but also “less than half the pay of white women.” And unlike the vast majority of white women in America, “in 1940 two out of every five negro women... worked for a living.” This meant that black women were in many cases the main breadwinners of the family, in a society predicated on patriarchy and women’s role being in the home.
The purpose of the essay was to underscore the importance of understanding the particular history and oppression of black women for Communist Party members, to “root out” all expressions of white chauvinism, and to urgently address the failure of the trade union movement to organise mostly black women domestic workers. She argued that in this way the party would be better able to bring these issues into the workplaces and community organisations, strengthening the whole of the trade union and socialist movement.
As a black woman leader of the Communist Party, Jones was spied on and eventually arrested for her political activities. In 1953 she was convicted for advocating the overthrow of the US government, imprisoned and eventually deported to London. There she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and within 3 years launched the first black newspaper in Britain, West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News. In 1959 she helped to organise the first Caribbean Carnival to celebrate the culture and heritage of the West Indian community.
Tragically, at the age of only 49, Claudia Jones was found dead on 24 December 1964. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, directly to the left of Karl Marx in fact. On her tombstone are the words, “Valiant fighter against racism and imperialism who dedicated her life to the progress of socialism and the liberation of her own black people.”
Jones was a prolific writer and theorist for the Communist Party during the ‘40s and ‘50s, a period when Communist Parties globally followed a disastrous policy of popular frontism, whereby they allied themselves with liberal pro-capitalist parties and conservative trade union leaders. The end result of these policies was a squandering of revolutionary opportunities.
Nonetheless, it’s important for socialists to study the theoretical work of revolutionaries from other tendencies. All too often members of revolutionary organisations limit their study of contemporary theoretical material from their own revolutionary tendency.
Claudia Jones’ work on the triple oppression of black women helped to broaden our understanding of the workings of capitalist society, most importantly the reproduction of racist and sexist oppressions. She demanded revolutionaries dedicate themselves to understanding the plight of black women workers and recognise the revolutionary potential inherent in their position in capitalist society. Looking at the history of the Black Freedom Movement, and its most recent upsurge in Black Lives Matter protests, over the last 7 years, the role of black women and queer people in building and sustaining the movement, the revolutionary potential of black women workers that Jones’ insisted upon is still clear today.