[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Harriet Sherwood (The Guardian) reviews that Trinidad-born journalist, founding father of the West Indian Gazette, and activist Claudia Jones is amongst 5 girls whose life and legacy will likely be marked by English Heritage. English Heritage often awards about 12 plaques a 12 months commemorating folks of “important public standing.”
The girl described because the “founding spirit” of the Notting Hill carnival is to be commemorated with a blue plaque at her former London residence this 12 months.
Claudia Jones, a feminist, political activist and journalist who was born in Trinidad in 1915, is considered one of 5 girls whose achievements and legacy will likely be marked by English Heritage. A sixth blue plaque will commemorate the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
Jones got here to the UK in 1955 from the US, the place her exercise as a member of the Communist celebration through the McCarthy period led to her imprisonment and deportation. At her sentencing, she mentioned she was dedicated to preventing “for full and unequivocal equality for my folks, the Negro folks, which as a Communist I consider can solely be achieved allied to the reason for the working class”.
Black folks within the US have been subjected to “the bitter indignity and humiliation of second-class citizenship, the particular standing which makes a mockery of our authorities’s prated claims of a ‘free America’ in a ‘free world’”, she mentioned.
Within the UK, Jones based the primary main Black British newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, and addressed union conferences and peace rallies. She got here up with the concept of bringing Caribbean carnival to London, with the primary occasion going down at St Pancras city corridor in January 1959. It later moved to the streets of west London and have become referred to as the Notting Hill carnival.
Jones died in 1964, aged 49. Her headstone in Highgate cemetery in north London describes her as “a valiant fighter towards racism and imperialism, who devoted her life to the progress of socialism and the liberation of her personal black folks”.
The blue plaque will likely be erected at a home in Vauxhall, south London, the place she lived for 4 years.
English Heritage will even have a good time two suffragettes, Emily Wilding Davison and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. [. . .]
English Heritage often awards about 12 plaques a 12 months commemorating folks of “important public standing”. In 2016, the organisation appealed for ladies to be nominated because it revealed that solely 13% of blue plaques in London have been devoted to feminine figures.
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/tradition/2023/jan/26/claudia-jones-founding-spirit-notting-hill-carnival-blue-plaque-london-home-english-heritage
For extra data on Jones, see books by Carol Boyce Davies, Claudia Jones: Past Containment (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Lifetime of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke College Press, 2008).
[Photo above: Claudia Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, addressed union meetings and peace rallies after coming to the UK in 1955. FPG/Getty Images.]