“The Lady with the Lamp, the Statue of Liberty, stands in New York Harbour. Her back is squarely turned on the USA. It’s no wonder, considering what she would have to look upon. She would weep, if she had to face this way.”
Claudia Jones wrote these words, more relevant now than ever, while incarcerated at Ellis Island in the late 1940s. As an immigrant journalist and political activist with distinctly anti-fascist, anti-imperialist views, she wouldn’t bat an eye at the current political turmoil in the U.S. Turns out Donald Trump is not the founder of political repression and xenophobia, as evidenced by how Harry Truman’s administration targeted Jones for being a leader in the Communist Party USA and an immigrant from Trinidad. In December 1955, Jones was deported from the U.S. to the United Kingdom (her native country denied her entrance) after being incarcerated four times due to her political activities and non-citizen status. She died of a heart attack nine years later, her resting place left of Karl Marx’s grave in a London cemetery...
Claudia Jones’ story is not told nearly enough, especially during Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Bernie Sanders’ flock would have us believe socialism has always been for and by white men, but Jones’ life proves that Black women have been calling for an end to capitalism in the U.S. for a long time...
As a blue-collar worker who never attended college, Jones believed feminism belonged to more than just white, upper class, and/or educated women. She wrote about Black women making only half the pay of white women despite being more likely to be in the workplace. She furtherv complicated this by noting that unlike white women, Black women contributed to their household as much or more than their men. Jones was one of the first to theorize that a class analysis excluding race and gender is not a liberatory one...
~BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS
Read More: https://www.bgdblog.org/2017/03/claudia-jones/
Learn More: Claudia Jones And The FBI Harassment Of Black Radicals
Book
No comments:
Post a Comment