Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays and Poems - Softcover

Claudia Jones is one of my personal heroines. I spent my formative political years in Claudia Jones's London stamping ground of Notting Hill - it was the classic centre of post-war black activism in Britain. Most West Indian immigrants in the 1950s came by boat to Southampton and the train from there took them into Paddington. Hence the large black community in that part of West London. So I know people who had worked with Claudia Jones and spoke of her with awe. She founded two of Black Britain's most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette and she was also one of the founding organizers of the Notting Hill Carnival.

Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment transcends the silencing and erasure historically accorded women of achievement: it makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked twentieth-century political and cultural activist, who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings, poetry, essays on subjects close to her political heart - human rights, peace, struggles related to gender, race and class - this is a collection that unites the many facets of a woman whose identities as a radical thinker and as a black woman are not in conflict.

Carole Boyce Davies is an African Diaspora Studies scholar and professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008). With this her second book on Claudia Jones, Davies continues the task of ensuring that Claudia Jones takes her rightful place in the exalted list of twentieth-century Caribbean intellectuals in the Diaspora, including her compatriots George Padmore and C.L.R. James, who engaged with the world to make it a more enlightened place and whose legacy still deserves to resonate.