Claudia Jones

Claudia Jones
Born	Claudia Vera Cumberbatch (1915-02-21)21 February 1915 Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Died	24 December 1964(1964-12-24) (aged 49) London, England
Resting place	Highgate Cemetery
Nationality	Trinidadian
Other names	Claudia Cumberbatch Jones
Occupation(s)	Journalist, activist
Years active	1936–1964
Known for	Organiser of 1959 Caribbean carnival event, precursor of the Notting Hill Carnival. Founder of West Indian Gazette, Britain's first major Black community newspaper. Communist activism.
Political party	Communist Party USA, Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)
Criminal charges	Charged under the McCarran Act
Criminal penalty	Imprisonment and eventual deportation to the United Kingdom
Relatives	Trevor Carter (cousin)

Claudia Vera Jones (née Cumberbatch; 21 February 1915 – 24 December 1964) was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation".^[1] Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and organised a series of indoor Caribbean carnivals from 1959 which have been cited as an influence on what became the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world.