by Marika Sherwood

with Donald Hinds, Colin Prescod and the 1996 Claudia Jones Symposium

published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1999    UK£13.99 US$22.50

ISBN 0 85315 882 7

Friends, followers and aficionados of Claudia Jones, the mother of Carnival in Britain, have been waiting eagerly for this book since a 1996 London symposium on her life inspired the author, Marika Sherwood, to undertake an intensive period of research into the public records of Trinidad, Britain, USA and the former Soviet Union and into the archives of their various communist parties. The result is a fascinating story of the immense courage of one of the greatest Black women in the 20th century and her battles against racism, bureaucracy and sinister attempts by politicians and security forces of the East and West to silence her. And all the while she was having to cope with severe heart disease and the aftermath of TB contracted in the desperate poverty of a 1930s Harlem ghetto apartment.

Claudia Jones was born in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1915 but, following the loss of the family fortunes due to the post-war cocoa price crash, she was sent at the age of eight with her three sisters to join her parents in New York. Claudia's mother died five years later and in the depression years her father was fortunate to obtain work as the janitor of a run down apartment block in Harlem. So wretched was their poverty that they could not afford the 'graduation outfit' to enable Claudia to receive the Roosevelt Award for Good Citizenship she had earned, and so damp was their apartment that her formal education was virtually ended in 1932 by the tuberculosis which irreparably damaged her lungs.

The book too often assumes that the reader will have an intimate knowledge of important historical events and fails to set the political scene, forcing the interested reader to take time to search out the background elsewhere. For instance we are told that, persuaded by the spirited defence by the Communist Party of nine Negro boys falsely convicted of rape in 1935 in Scottsboro, Alabama, Claudia joined the Young Communist League where her talents as a writer and organiser were soon recognised. A more detailed description than that given in a short note of the celebrated kangaroo court trial of these unfortunate young men in the lynch-mob Deep South would have placed Claudia's experiences as a young Black woman into context and revealed the oppressive conditions under which Black people could do little more than survive.

By 1948 Claudia had been elected to the National Committee of the Communist Party of USA, was the Editor for Negro Affairs on the party's paper the Daily Worker and had been arrested for the first time under threat of deportation to Trinidad. A much sought after speaker and advocate for peace and civil rights, Claudia travelled widely in the United States but was arrested several times eventually being imprisoned for a year on trumped up charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government. While in prison her health deteriorated and in 1955 she was deported to England, much to the relief of the British colonial governor of Trinidad who had feared that she might "prove troublesome" had she been sent there. Once again the McCarran Act, under which Claudia was prosecuted in USA, and the relevance of Ellis Island, where she was imprisoned, should have been explained in the context of the vicious political persecution of large numbers of people contrary to their constitutional rights to freedom of thought and free speech.

Looking forward to the support of the British Communist Party, Claudia arrived in London in December 1955, having been given an affectionate send off by 350 friends and comrades led by her closest friends, the great, Black singer/actor Paul Robeson and his wife Essie. Robeson was of course still being refused the right to travel by an American government which had the bare-faced cheek to criticise the USSR for behaving similarly towards its own dissident citizens. Claudia herself was to find that the British government was no less oppressive and antidemocratic as it refused her a full passport until 1962 in spite of representations from Trinidad's first black prime minister, Dr Eric Williams, its white colonial governor having argued for restrictions on her freedom to travel to be maintained. The author's difficulty in establishing the full facts is ominously clear as some forty years later the British authorities still refuse to release files on Claudia Jones for research purposes. What do they fear from this long dead Black woman?

The reader is treated to an all too short but fascinating discussion of the warm correspondence her friends 'back home' in New York kept up with Claudia. It reveals just a glimpse of the dire financial condition she found herself in England and a flash of her grief for a lover she left behind. The deeply racist attitudes of the British Communist Party are also exposed in a well researched chapter on its relations with what they regarded as the "backward" peoples of the world. The CPGB view of this intelligent but sometimes feisty woman was clearly that, as a 'coloured' colonial subject of the British Empire, too much should not be expected of her. That racism is still evident today amongst old style British communists, most of whom now cower behind any other name.

British communists, however, felt under an obligation to their American comrades to help Claudia obtain work but placed her mainly in positions which this highly competent woman found frustrating, while restricting her access to their publications and as a speaker on their platforms, even for visits of her close friend, Paul Robeson. In the USA Claudia had been used to a party which respected her, and the CPUSA had since its foundation in 1919 been the leading political group fighting for racial equality. In the absence of genuine fraternal warmth from her English party comrades, Claudia turned to the Caribbean community in London which welcomed her with affection and she soon became their undoubted leader.

In the late 1950s the social strains exerted on an English working class being forced to come to terms with the sham of their indoctrinated racial superiority culminated in attacks on Black people and rioting. In Notting Hill, west London, this resulted in the murder in May 1958 of a young Antiguan carpenter, Kelso Cochrane, by six white youths who have never been caught. This was a turning point in Black/White relations, and a committee under the chairmanship of Amy Ashwood Garvey, which included Claudia Jones, met at Trinidadian Dr (later Lord) David Pitt's surgery to organise approaches to the government. However, the Tory government seemed more interested in pushing through racist immigration control laws and refusing to ratify the ILO Convention on Racial Discrimination. From that point until her untimely death six years later, Claudia became the foremost Black leader in Britain, sought after by progressive political leaders and acknowledged internationally as a fighter for peace.

The story of the West Indian Gazette, founded in 1958 and edited by Claudia Jones, is told by Donald Hinds, a Jamaican, who joined the paper as its first young roving reporter. Like all the other staff he was unpaid and survived by working as a bus conductor while studying part time for a Bachelor's then a Master's degree, becoming in due course a history teacher. He discusses the various activities of the paper which, in spite of its unceasing financial problems, was Claudia's vanguard in her fight for a fair deal for Black people. Hinds traces the difficult relationship Claudia loyally maintained with her gentleman friend, the late Abhimanyu Manchanda, who seems to have been deeply disliked by almost everybody. This self-promoting communist from India argued with Claudia frequently about the way the paper was run and even threatened to sue her when he could not get his own way.

Manchanda was not above spreading lies about colleagues especially if they had opposed him politically. One such was a well known left-wing writer who, according to a 1962 letter from Manchanda to Claudia while she was receiving medical attention in Moscow, had refused to sell the West Indian Gazette in the hairdressing salons of his Trinidadian mother because of its support for Nkrumah, Jagan and Castro. Having expressed his concern to the publishers that Hinds failed to check the veracity of the contents of Manchanda's letter, they have promised him to include a note in any future revisions of the book refuting the allegations.

"A People's Art is the Genesis of their Freedom"

In telling the story of how Claudia brought Carnival to Britain, Colin Prescod, son of Trinidadian actress Pearl Prescod, rehearses how in response to the 1958 riots Claudia began to organise Carnivals under the auspices of the West Indian Gazette, the prime purposes of which were "to present West Indian talent to the public, which at that time could not see Caribbean people as anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water". The programme for the first show in February 1959 clearly declared Claudia's intentions, "A part of the proceeds of this brochure are to assist the payment of fines of coloured and white youths involved in the Notting Hill events". For six years, these indoor Mardi Gras celebrations, which were to evolve into Notting Hill Carnival a few months after Claudia's death, were organised in halls in west London under the slogan, "A people's art is the genesis of their freedom".

These early indoor Carnival events drew a level of genuine support from famous artists, leading politicians and Commonwealth High Commissioners which was never to be seen in the outdoor Notting Hill Carnival. Rather, as the British authorities became concerned that they might not be able to control the ever growing numbers of 'freeness' loving Black people, they used every method they could to ban it or cut it down to the catatonic insipidity of an English garden fete. After decades of scheming opposition, in 1989 the English authorities succeeded in wrenching out of the hands of Black administrators control of the carnival they could not stop but, in doing so, they destroyed its spirit of Kaiso. Only Black people chosen by government are now allowed to run the heavily restricted Carnival of today.

The book is completed with four chapters of selected transcripts of how participators in the 1996 Symposium remembered Claudia as friend, political activist, newspaper woman and carnivalist. It is copiously annotated, which will be a useful guide for future researchers, but it is a great pity that the publishers cut out so much of the manuscript, about one eighth, without consulting the author; and why did they refuse to publish any of the Carnival pictures? This reviewer challenged them to explain, but the anger they expressed at his questions would suggest that the charge that their actions were racist might well have been valid. However the author, an Hungarian brought up in Australia, must be commended on having produced an important historical work which will prove a valuable academic resource in future. Hopefully it will inspire students and writers to investigate the life of a great daughter of Trinidad further, and maybe one of them may be moved to write a biography with more appeal to the mass of the public.

© NTP Trust April MMI