Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2024: Margaret Kimberley
The life and work of Claudia Jones hold timely lessons for anyone seeking to understand America and the world in the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump as US president, Margaret Kimberley said at the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2024.
The life and work of Claudia Jones hold timely lessons for anyone seeking to understand America and the world in the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump as US president, Margaret Kimberley said at the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2024.
Kimberley, who is executive editor and senior columnist of Black Agenda Report, host of Black Agenda radio podcasts, and author of “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents”, published in 2020 by Steerforth Press, said.“It is an important subject, but we can't allow ourselves to be confused by personalities, or allow…Donald Trump, to be exceptionalised”.
Introducing Kimberley, Roger McKenzie (acting chair of the NUJ’s Black Members Council) noted that she had won several awards, including the Serena Shim award for uncompromising integrity in journalism and the 2021 Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press Women and Media Award.
The annual Claudia Jones lecture is a reminder there are always “people who fought for their freedom, personally and for the good of humanity and for the good of black people. In particular, Claudia Jones was one such person, and we quite rightly honour and celebrate her all these years after her passing,” Kimberley said.
Born Claudia Cumberbatch in Trinidad in 1915, Jones moved to the United States when she was eight years old. The first Red Scare, whipping up public hostility to socialist and communist ideologies, had begun in 1919, under the guise of fighting anarchism and communism following the Russian revolution, and the same year saw a wave of racist violence across the United States.
“These racist attacks took place without any sort of legal consequence for the perpetrators,” Kimberley said. “So this is the context for Claudia Jones’ work as a revolutionary and as a journalist.”
Claudia became a Marxist in her youth, growing up in a divided country. A journalist and a leftist, in the 1940s, she became a target beginning in the 1940s. She was truthful about her membership of the Young Communist League and was denied citizenship as a result.
The Alien Registration Act made it illegal to advocate for the violent overthrow of the United States government, and anyone who was a communist was automatically assumed to support those ends. Beginning in 1942, Claudia was under scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which recommended her deportation at that time.
She eventually was deported in 1955 but to London, England, not to her Caribbean homeland, as the colonial Governor of Trinidad said ‘she may prove troublesome’.
“I suppose that was probably true, but also is a badge of honour for Jones,” said Kimberley.
Clearly, Claudia Jones’ experience, first denied citizenship and then deported, carry echoes as the second Trump administration prepares to take office.
“Donald Trump has run for president three times and won twice, in large part because of his hostility to immigrants, bragging during his first campaign that he would build a wall on the border with Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it.”
However as Claudia Jones would have recognised, these changes in office between Democrats and Republicans did not necessarily mean there were changes for the better for black people.
“[In his first] term in office, Donald Trump deported 1.5 million people. However, in his first term, Barack Obama deported 2.9 million – and that's still a record – and in the second term, 1.9 million. So in both of his terms, Obama deported more people than Donald Trump did,” said Kimberley.
“So I wind up by saying we should all try to be like Claudia Jones…I haven't been imprisoned, I haven't been deported. The least I can do is continue to tell the truth and part of that truth is that people who seek justice for humanity will always be under attack if Donald Trump is in office, if Joe Biden is in office, if Barack Obama is in office. So we must be truthful about the nature of bourgeois elections.”
Kimberley said one of her heroes in journalism was Glen Ford, her “mentor and comrade”, who co-founded Black Agenda Report with her and Bruce Dixon.
“Glen was an amazing man; he had an interesting life story. He grew up mostly in Jersey City, New Jersey, just outside of New York. But he also he was a red diaper baby – that means born a socialist. His mother was a socialist.”
“Glen spent part of his childhood in Georgia, in the segregated South... He was in the military during the Vietnam era. He was a black panther as a young man, his father was a DJ in Georgia.”
Before his death in 2021, Glen completed the manuscript for a book, The Black Agenda, published by Or Books. “I encourage everybody to read that,” said Kimberley, “he was an amazing man.”
