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Here are the papers and other writing I’ve published related to the life, work, and legacy of Claudia Jones:

Claudia Jones: Brief life of an intersectional activist: 1915-1964 (2020) – Vita published in the September-October 2020 edition of Harvard Magazine

P.S. “A Strange and Terrible Sight In Our Country” (2019 post) – continued inspiration from Claudia Jones in the time of Trump

P.S. The Windrush Generation (2018 post) – parallels between the U.K. and the U.S.; including Claudia Jones’ “An Editorial: The Colour-Bar Bill” (July, 1962)

P.S. “Not used in Bulletin. Put in file.” (1956) (2017 post) – an archival discovery about Claudia Jones’ friend Ben Davis, Harvard Law School ’29

Coming of Age in the 1950s All Over Again (2016 post) – inspiration from Claudia Jones in the early days of Trump

Finding Claudia Jones (2015 post) – on my first encounter with Claudia Jones’ life and work

“A Pride in Being West Indian”: Claudia Jones and The West Indian Gazette (2012 paper) – this grew out of a presentation I gave in 2010 on the panel “Radical Women of Color as Organic Intellectuals” at the Organization of American Historians conference in Washington, D.C.

In 2008-2009 I was a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University conducting research on Claudia Jones in the company of several other students of “The Long Civil Rights Movement” – the theme for that year. I presented a paper on “’You Dare Not Assert that Negro Women Can Think and Write and Speak!’ Claudia Jones on Race and Racism, 1936-1955.”

“A Strange and Terrible Sight in Our Country” (2006 essay) – published in the Women’s Review of Books, based on Claudia Jones’ 1950 letter from detention on Ellis Island

Further reading:

Carole Boyce Davies (Ed.). 2011. Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment. Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

Erik S. McDuffie. 2011. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Duke University Press.

Dayo F. Gore. 2011. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. NYU Press.

Carole Boyce Davies. 2008. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Duke University Press.

Tombstone of Claudia Jones in Highgate Cemetery

Next to the enormous bust of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery lies a small stone marking the ashes of a remarkable woman: Claudia Jones: “valiant fighter against racism and imperialism who dedicated her life to the progress of socialism and the liberation of her own black people.”