Claudia Jones — West Indian Gazette

Claudia Jones — journalist, communist, and progenitor of the Notting Hill Carnival — is buried in Highgate Cemetery beside Karl Marx. After Senator McCarthy’s prosecutors deported her from the United States in 1955, Trinidad-born Claudia Jones arrived in London and within three years had founded the West Indian Gazette — the first major Black newspaper in Britain.

In the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the murder of Kelso Cochrane, she organised an indoor ‘Caribbean Carnival’ at St Pancras Town Hall (1959). It is widely recognised as the seed of what is now the Notting Hill Carnival, Europe’s largest street festival.

She died on Christmas Day 1964 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, two graves to the left of Karl Marx.

People

• Claudia Jones

Themes

• Civic life
• Labour movement
• Caribbean diaspora
• Pan-Africanism

Place

• Camden
• Post-war — Windrush

Hero image

• File: /media/people/claudia-jones.jpg
• Credit: Unknown photographer (CPUSA era)
• License: Public domain
• Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AClaudia_Jones%2C_likely_during_her_time_in_the_CPUSA.jpg

Sources

• Boyce Davies, Carole. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Duke University Press, 2008.
• Highgate Cemetery — Notable Burials — https://highgatecemetery.org/