[First delivered as a speech to the Claudia Jones Commemoration in Highgate Cemetery, London, Sunday 22nd February 2026]
Comrades,
It is an honour to stand here today on behalf of the Young Communist League to pay tribute to Claudia Jones, a dedicated Communist.
This year marks the 111th anniversary of her birth in Trinidad when it was still the British West Indies. She came to the US as a young girl and from the moment she joined the Communist Party at 21 years old, her life was dedicated to social justice and class struggle. Her dedication to the working-class movement, Black liberation and the fight for women’s emancipation is an example to all young Communists today. It is our proud Communist Party tradition to inherit, and a call to action to continue Claudia’s legacy.
Why is Claudia Jones so important for the youth to understand?
Because Claudia spearheaded Communist thought on the concept of the ‘triple burden’ that Black women face, super-exploited and oppressed as workers, Black people and women.
Capitalism doesn’t just exploit workers but it divides them too to exploit them more effectively. It relies on the oppression of the super-exploited to drive down wages and terms and conditions.
Claudia’s life wasn’t just about theory but about praxis too. She organised, agitated and educated particularly young Black women. As a young woman in her twenties, she led the Communist Party’s Women’s Commission and later, under the pressures of McCarthyism, went to prison in Alderson. At the detention house, before she was sentenced, there was a young Black woman aged 19, who was dejected and miserable. She informed Claudia and her comrades that her birthday was the next day so Claudia and co organised a cake and sang her happy birthday. The next day, the young woman wrote a note to them saying, “I think even though you all are Communist people, you are the best people I have ever met… I think that you are some of the nicest people I ever met in my whole 19 years of living and I will never forget you all no matter where I am.” Claudia is fondly remembered by many who met her.
Claudia saw the humanity in everyone, especially the most oppressed.
After Claudia was released from Alderson, her comrade and friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn remained in Alderson. Flynn wrote a farewell poem which ended with these lines:
I will be strong in our common faith, dear comrade,
I will be self-sufficient, to our ideals firm and true,
I will be strong to keep my mind and soul outside a prison,
Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you.
This commitment is the golden thread between generations in our movement.
In Britain today, the pay gap still sees women paid less for work of equal value. We see Black and minority ethnic workers confined to low-paid, insecure work with little hope of progression. We see young and migrant workers used as cheap, disposable labour to undermine collective agreements that trade unions fight hard to win.
We also are seeing the rise of Reform UK. This is not a party of the working class. It is led by Thatcherite, pro-Trump multimillionaires, who work in the interest of multimillionaires. Its strategy is to weaponise the real anger and frustration of working people, anger about the housing crisis, soaring energy bills, and public services in crisis. Reform UK offers easy scapegoats in migrants and Muslims, telling working people that their enemy is their neighbour, rather than the ruling capitalist class.
This rhetoric is the same old filth dressed up in new clothes. While Reform UK offers lies and division, the Communist Party offers the alternative. There is widespread support for policies in our own Left-Wing Programme, public ownership of energy and water, a wealth tax on the super-rich. Our duty is to build the class struggle for socialism. We must expose Reform UK for the pro-big business, anti-working-class party it is, doing so by winning people to the Communist Party’s alternative.
So as we remember Claudia Jones today, let us honour her legacy by being on the front lines of the labour and progressive movements, in our workplaces, campuses and communities fighting for socialism and against the scapegoating by the far right. Young people are fighting for a world where austerity and war is replaced by peace and socialism.
Capitalism is incapable of providing peace and liberation. The only true path to liberation is the fight for socialism.
Thank you.
Georgina Andrews, is General Secretary of the Young Communist League
