VETERAN black activist and scholar Cecil Gutzmore told me last week that Claudia Jones “was one of the most important figures in diaspora African history.” 

Coming from someone who himself is one of our most important activists and scholars, that is praise indeed — and I agree with him.

I had the honour last weekend to speak at the Communist Party of Britain-organised commemoration of the life of Jones, who is buried to the left of Karl Marx at Highgate cemetery in north London.

The Trinidadian-born communist was deported to Britain from the United States in 1955 because of her political activities and later founded the Notting Hill Carnival and the historic West Indian Gazette, which she also edited.

Jones was a complete community and political activist — much of which I could happily have spoken about on Saturday — but I wanted to concentrate on her importance as a journalist.

Jones was writing in the Gazette at a time when the black community in Britain was under siege. The colour bar was in full operation and white thugs roamed the streets attacking any black person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and where being petrol-bombed in your home or having your window smashed was fairly common.

She wrote about the struggles people of African descent faced in this country and across the diaspora. But Jones was not writing of this fight against racism and colonialism as some sort of bystander. 

Jones wrote as someone who was herself a participant in the fight for equality, dignity and respect but also realised that small victories on their own were not enough. She knew only an end of capitalism and a socialist revolution could make any lasting difference.

She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that change would occur overnight. Far from it. Her writing reflected a clear understanding of the nature of class struggle and the ongoing task of winning hearts and minds.

Writing about the international struggle against racism by black people, Jones revealed an often forgotten truth about black people: we have never just waited around to be liberated. We have always resisted racism.

Often the acts of resistance are remembered for the large rebellions that have hit the headlines, or the exploits of the “superstars” — the staple of periods such as Black History Month.

But largely ignored are the people waging daily acts of resistance. People who will never likely go into the history books but who are as heroic in the struggle as anyone.

These were the people that Jones wrote about in the Gazette — the unsung heroes of black liberation. People resisting the daily racism in the factories or finding ways to work around banks or landlords denying access. 

Jones amplified the voices of those individuals and their communities of struggle that would otherwise have gone unreported. And she set it all within a critique of capitalism.

After all, one of the key roles for a radical journalist is not merely to report the stories that everyone else can see elsewhere. It is to give a voice, a microphone, a camera to people who would be unheard or unseen and offer a vision for the future.

What is clear from Jones’s work in the Gazette in her day — just as it is today — is that the struggle against racism was constant. 

Fighting racism is never the luxury of a mere moment for black people — it is life. Indeed, often it is a choice of life or death.

Jones’s writing also reminds us that black people have never been empty vessels waiting for white activists from the global North to fill us with their knowledge.

We already had a deep understanding of what racism looks like and the many different ways we could take to resist it and to fight back.

Jones showed how the resistance to racism has always been transnational and how this helped create a global community of black activists.

Most black people I know would shy away from being called an activist but, at the same time, they possess as deep an understanding of how racism works as you are likely to find from any academic who chooses to write about us.

If we accept that workers learn in struggle, then surely it follows that the daily fight against racism waged by black people has served to deepen our understanding albeit to varying degrees?

The revolutionary writing of Jones did not just provide a lesson for white people in the rich black radical tradition, it also helped to shape a specific British experience of black consciousness.

I will write more about this consciousness in a future column but it goes beyond the clothes we wear or our hairstyles into a self-realisation our history did not begin with enslavement and that we should never accept anyone defining our African heritage as inferior.

By connecting the diasporic struggles Jones helped remind readers that the racism they were experiencing in Britain was not to be endured but resisted — and that we knew how to do it.

She wrote from an understanding of the struggle because she was part of those struggles. And she also wrote as an unapologetic revolutionary black woman.

Jones wrote in a way that did not require training in Marxist-Leninist theory to understand what she said. But she had the craft skills as a journalist to still explain how what was happening was part of the class struggle.

Jones reminded the black community they were not alone in the struggle against racism.

That struggle often feels lonely when some white people — on the left or right — tout their anti-racism credentials only to drop us when it’s no longer in their interests. It is tiresome and, sadly, far from unusual.

I believe that Jones was able to write the way she did because she understood the limitations of a simple colour or race-based approach. 

She never undervalued our collective experience as black people. She understood how her triple oppression of being black, a woman and working class intertwined.

Jones knew that only a resistance that understood this interconnection had a chance of winning for black people and the working class more widely.

These are all reasons why Claudia Jones is, for me, one of the great radical journalists of any era and of any colour.