The NUJ's Black Members' Council organises the Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture.
2022 marks the 20th year anniversary of the lectures. To mark the milestone, the NUJ has compliled previous speeches from prominent speakers.
You can watch more of the previous lectures in this Youtube playlist. Click on the icon in the top right to see all videos in the playlist.
The 2013 lecture by Dr Nicola Rollock is available as an audio file on Soundcloud:
About Claudia Jones
Claudia Jones was born in Trinidad in 1924, but later moved to New York where she encountered poverty and discrimination.
In 1936, she joined the Young Communist League and joined the staff of the Daily Worker. She was arrested in 1955 and served a year in prison before being deported and given asylum in the UK.
Confronted by posters saying "No blacks, no dogs, no Irish", she became a leader in the Black equal rights movement that was emerging in London's Notting Hill and founded The West Indian Gazette, one of the first Black newspapers in the UK.
Claudia always believed that "a people's art is the genesis of their freedom" and in 1959 was one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival. Today the carnival is the biggest in Europe and is a fitting memorial to Claudia's life of activism and campaigning. Claudia died in London on Christmas Day, 1964, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.
