Beyond the Whack-a-Mole Left
Though often condemned to the fringes of American political life, the radical left has changed the course of US history.
Claudia Jones in London in the 1960s. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Divisions
In 1923, Claudia Jones and her parents emigrated from Port of Spain, Trinidad to New York City. As a teenager in Harlem during the 1930s, she joined the international movement to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama.
This activism compelled her to join the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which had worked tirelessly on the Scottsboro defendants’ behalf, and she spent the rest of her life as a committed Communist, serving the party in several roles, including editor of the Daily Worker.
In 1955, after being hounded by the federal government for nearly a decade, Jones was deported. She lived out the rest of her life in London, where she continued her work as a left-wing activist and journalist. She now rests in Highgate Cemetery, next to Karl Marx.
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