Claudia Jones was born into poverty in Trinidad, but moved to New York with her family when she was eight. As a young woman, she became involved in communist and black politics and by 1948 was elected onto the National Committee of the Communist Party of the USA. Becoming increasingly radical, over the next decade she was imprisoned several times, ending with her deportation to Britain in 1955.
On arrival in Britain, she was disappointed to find that many British communists were hostile to a black woman. So Claudia Jones turned her zeal to the local Caribbean community. In 1958, she founded the West Indian Gazette, the first black newspaper in Britain. The following year, she set up a "mardi gras", a forerunner to the Notting Hill Carnival. Claudia Jones died in 1964 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.
