Jones, Claudia

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Jones, Claudia

February 21, 1915
December 25, 1964

Communist Party leader Claudia Jones was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and moved with her family to Harlem, in New York, in 1924. While Jones was still a teenager, her mother died, which forced Jones to leave school and work in a factory. In the early 1930s she became involved in the campaign to free the nine Scottsboro Boys, a campaign led by the Communist-dominated International Labor Defense, and she was recruited into the Harlem branch of the Young Communist League (YCL). Shortly afterward, Jones became editor of the YCL's Weekly Review and the Spotlight. In 1940 she was elected chair of the YCL's national council.

During the 1930s and 1940s Jones was active in the party's civil rights campaigns and supported the National Negro Congress, a civil rights organization that increasingly came under the influence of the Communist Party. She was also a leading voice within the party for women's rights and, after World War II, was appointed to the party national executive committee's commission on women, briefly serving as its secretary.

In 1948 Jones and several other party leaders were arrested on charges of sedition and she was nearly deported before a protest campaign compelled the federal government to free her on bail. Two years later Jones was rearrested under the Smith Act, along with fifteen other party leaders, for "teaching and advocating Marxism." In 1951 she was convicted and imprisoned in a federal penitentiary for one year.

In 1955 Jones was deported. She settled in London, where she renewed her work with the Communist Party. During the late 1950s and early 1960s she also served as the editor of the left-wing West Indian Gazette and worked for the Caribbean Labour Congress. Jones died in London in 1964.