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The Political Life and Times of Claudia Jones
by David Horsley
Manifesto Press, £4.95
CLAUDIA JONES (1915-1964) is hardly unsung, given the growing number of books and film documentaries on the woman who, on indisputable merit, is interred immediately to the left of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.
In this account of an extraordinary Caribbean communist, David Horsley’s focus is on Jones’s life in advancing class, race and gender resistance to the racist system of imperialism in what George Jackson called “the belly of the beast.”
He describes her intense engagement as an activist member, first of the Communist Party of the USA (1936-1955) and then, following her deportation as a “dangerous, disloyal or subversive” person, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) (1955-64).
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