Born in 1915 in Port Au Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Claudia Jones grew up in Harlem during its renaissance and joined the Communist Party aged 18 before becoming a scholar and activist. After being incarcerated for her work with the party, she was deported in 1955 and found refuge in the United Kingdom. It was here that she founded the longstanding Notting Hill Carnival and made her most famous request: that she would be buried “to the left of Karl Marx.”

Read and introduced by Africana studies professor Carole Boyce Davies.

This episode dives into Claudia Jones’s 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”—an early, woefully understudied text of Black feminist Marxism.

In our interview, Boyce Davies speaks to the importance of the essay: “One of my colleagues who is producing a book on Black feminism wants to date Black feminist thought from this particular essay. One could of course take it back further to Harriet Tubman or even Ida B Wells—but it is Claudia Jones who puts together questions that became central to Black feminist theorizing and the work of people like Angela Davis. Jones builds on classic Marxist thought to define the super-exploitation of the Black woman—how we are exploited not just through class, but through class, race, and gender.”