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A review by kevin_shepherd
Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones by Carole Boyce Davies
4.0
“The only Black woman among communists tried in the United States, sentenced for crimes against the state, incarcerated, and then deported, Claudia Jones seems to have simply disappeared from major consideration in a range of histories… How could someone who had lived in the United States from the age of eight, who had been so central to Black and communist political organizing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, up to the mid-1950s, simply disappear?”
McCarthyism: the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of treason and subversion, especially when related to socialism, anarchism, and communism. Usually accomplished in a public forum for purposes of propaganda.
Chances are good, especially if you’re a white American and a product of American public schools, that you have never heard mention of Claudia Jones and her contributions to the anti-imperialist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. That’s because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), verifiable by their own documentation, waged an effective campaign to erase her from our collective consciousness. In Jones’ case, her crimes were her ideas and her ideas were deemed too dangerous for public consumption.
“As a negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against sixteen million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work to redress these grievances, for unity of workers, for women’s rights, and for my general political activity urging the American people to help by their struggles to change the present foreign and domestic policy of the United States.” ~CJ
Carole Boyce Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones is much more of an assessment than a description. If you read biographies simply because you want to be entertained, this is not your book. This is a high caliber, university level dissertation. Stay focused and take notes.
“The fine talk about the free flow and exchange of ideas internationally, and about freedom of speech in the U.S. rings false when placed against the desperate attempt to deport me because of my political views. I am proud of my political views because I learned them in American schools. The traditions of democratic struggle exemplified by Franklin, Lincoln, Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth are the ideas that inspired me and my views. Why are they so frightened by the political view of one negro woman?” ~Claudia Jones, 1955
“This rediscovery of Claudia Jones, the individual subject, reinstates a radical Black female intellectual-activist position into a range of African diaspora, left history, and Black feminist debates.” ~Carole Boyce Davies, 2007
McCarthyism: the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of treason and subversion, especially when related to socialism, anarchism, and communism. Usually accomplished in a public forum for purposes of propaganda.
Chances are good, especially if you’re a white American and a product of American public schools, that you have never heard mention of Claudia Jones and her contributions to the anti-imperialist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. That’s because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), verifiable by their own documentation, waged an effective campaign to erase her from our collective consciousness. In Jones’ case, her crimes were her ideas and her ideas were deemed too dangerous for public consumption.
“As a negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against sixteen million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work to redress these grievances, for unity of workers, for women’s rights, and for my general political activity urging the American people to help by their struggles to change the present foreign and domestic policy of the United States.” ~CJ
Carole Boyce Davies’ Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones is much more of an assessment than a description. If you read biographies simply because you want to be entertained, this is not your book. This is a high caliber, university level dissertation. Stay focused and take notes.
“The fine talk about the free flow and exchange of ideas internationally, and about freedom of speech in the U.S. rings false when placed against the desperate attempt to deport me because of my political views. I am proud of my political views because I learned them in American schools. The traditions of democratic struggle exemplified by Franklin, Lincoln, Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth are the ideas that inspired me and my views. Why are they so frightened by the political view of one negro woman?” ~Claudia Jones, 1955
“This rediscovery of Claudia Jones, the individual subject, reinstates a radical Black female intellectual-activist position into a range of African diaspora, left history, and Black feminist debates.” ~Carole Boyce Davies, 2007