Home
Membership
She was hunted by the FBI and transformed British culture – so why haven't you heard of this black activist?

She was hunted by the FBI and transformed British culture – so why haven't you heard of this black activist?

Yvonne Singh introduces the fearless woman who strove to restore pride to London’s battered Caribbean community through a groundbreaking new newspaper and Britain’s first Carnival event

A smiling person in the foreground, with two older black‑and‑white portraits behind them and bright festival colours in the background.

Published: September 1, 2026 at 2:00 PM

Save

At the end of August 1958, the streets of Notting Hill in west London became an acrid, smoke-fogged battleground. For months tensions had been building between the white population and migrants from the Caribbean. That evening, hundred-strong white mobs armed with improvised weapons – cudgels, iron bars, butchers’ knives and leather belts studded with nuts and bolts – marched through the streets, chanting: “Keep Britain white!” PC Richard Bedford, on duty that night, recalled hearing shouts of: “We will kill all black bastards!”

The violence, which was indiscriminate and shocking, continued until 5 September. Terrified residents of colour barricaded themselves in their homes as milk bottles and rocks were hurled at their doors, and young black men similarly armed themselves with makeshift weapons.

After those turbulent days of rioting, 108 people were charged, 72 of them white and 36 described as “coloured”. Even after the violence petered out, residents of colour reported a lingering sense of racial hatred and prejudice – “an atmosphere you could slice like a knife”.

Voice of a community

Five months before the Notting Hill race riots, Trinidad-born journalist Claudia Jones had launched a publication for her community in London. “There are at least 80,000 good reasons why we believe a West Indian newspaper is necessary,” she proclaimed in her first editorial for the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News in March 1958. “They are the 80,000 West Indians now resident here… we form a community with its own wants and problems.”

A group of men on a ship’s deck listening to an official in uniform reading instructions.

Caribbean migrants arrive at Tilbury aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948. Many settled in Notting Hill, creating a vibrant but later beleaguered community | Credit: Getty Images

A decade earlier, the ‘open-door’ policy of the 1948 British Nationality Act had augured the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush and a wave of migration from Britain’s Caribbean colonies. As numbers arriving from the West Indies grew, the rhetoric turned hostile: some of the media described a flood of migrants living in slum housing, spreading disease and undercutting wages. The situation was exploited by Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union Movement, which agitated in areas such as Notting Hill where Caribbean communities were established.

In this fractious atmosphere, Jones’s Gazette spoke out. “People without a voice were lambs to the slaughter,” Jones declared following the riots. Inevitably, it attracted foes. The Daily Worker’s front page of 28 August 1958 carried a report that the Ku Klux Klan of Britain had trashed the Gazette’s offices, smashing equipment and daubing graffiti on walls. That month, racist correspondence sent to the Gazette by the KKK addressed the editor as “Mr B. Ape”, and far-right movements targeted the paper.

Read more | The forgotten history of Windrush

Jones wasn’t deterred, having already worked for many years to improve conditions and rights for black people in the US. Born in Port of Spain on 21 February 1915, she’d moved to the US in 1924 with her parents, emigrating in search of the American dream. This “dream was soon disabused”, recalled Jones: the family were forced to reside in overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, and her mother died of spinal meningitis when the young Claudia was only 13. She stated in a later speech that, whenever injustice came to mind, “I would think of my mother”.

At the age of 21, Jones joined the Communist Party USA, impressed by its commitment to the rights of workers, women and people of colour. A distinguished career in US newspapers followed. Friends recalled her electrifying presence and flair for poetry. “She could command a rapt audience,” recalled one who had seen her speak at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

A person at a desk speaks on a rotary phone, with a typewriter and a newspaper laid out in front of them.

Jones at work in the offices of the West Indian Gazette above Theo’s Record Store in Brixton in 1962. Though the paper provided a vital resource for London’s Caribbean community after the riots of 1958, its finances became straitened | Credit: Getty Images

Jones’s charisma and star quality made her a target for J Edgar Hoover during the Cold War ‘Red Scare’. Having already served time in prison, and been threatened with deportation, in 1955 she began a year-long sentence at Alderson Women’s Penitentiary in West Virginia. After her release later that year, the 40-year-old Jones found herself on a ship sailing to the UK – a country where she had few friends or family.

Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked?

Through party contacts, Jones managed to find rented accommodation in London, but poverty bedevilled her time in the capital. The damp, smoggy climate exacerbated her health conditions; she had never fully recovered from tuberculosis contracted as a child, and she’d also been diagnosed with hypertensive cardio-vascular disease.

A woman holding papers stands among a small crowd as uniformed police officers look on.

Jones at the US Embassy in London in August 1963, delivering a petition calling for an end to racial discrimination | Credit: Alamy

In London, she became active in the many labour organisations supporting the expanding Caribbean community. A newspaper was mooted, and Jones, with her distinguished career in black American newspapers, was chosen as launch editor. This humble “one-leaf flyer”, as she initially described it, evolved to became a monthly paper with a substantial newsstand presence, and the likes of Malcolm X, WEB Du Bois and Norman Manley, the first premier of Jamaica, graced its offices above Theo’s Record Store in Brixton.

Those offices were also the first port of call for many people who faced racial discrimination, and Jones mobilised her contacts in local government, social services and the police to help them. “What they needed was a godmother,” recalled Gazette reporter Donald Hinds. “That was the role Claudia Jones played best.” Within its tabloid-format pages, the Gazette – cover price sixpence – carried news and analysis, arts reviews and sport, with a focus on the black community. It was run by a team of volunteers: Hinds also worked as a full-time bus conductor, while Jones’s sometime partner Abhimanyu Manchanda (‘Manu’) was managing editor and dealt with advertising, and Theo Campbell, who ran the record store below the offices, contributed the sports section.

A person in glasses sits on a patterned sofa, with a tall stack of papers beside them in a mid‑century interior.

Abhimanyu Manchanda, Jones’s sometime partner – and the managing editor of the West Indian Gazette – who was, like Claudia, a dedicated communist and activist | Credit: Getty Images

The paper thrived in the months following the riots, its circulation reaching 30,000 during the winter of 1958. “As we went into 1959, politicians from what was referred to as the British Caribbean were seen going up those stairs to talk to Claudia,” said Hinds. “The British media also sought Claudia’s opinions… [she] was the one with the finger on the pulse of British society.”

The Gazette served as an information repository for the black world at a critical juncture, following closely the horrors of South Africa’s apartheid regime and keeping readers abreast of decolonisation movements. “I don’t think I really grasped the true fact that I was in the presence of history,” Hinds said later.

Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”

Restoring pride

Jones’s greatest legacy was the establishment of Carnival in the UK, restoring the pride in West Indian culture that had been battered by the events of August 1958 when “everyone wanted to run away and leave”, as Jones’s friend Pearl Connor said.

In November 1958, the Gazette established a Caribbean Carnival committee, and the first event was held in London’s St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959. Timed to coincide with the festivities in Trinidad, it was televised by the BBC and featured ‘mas’ (short for ‘masquerade’) bands and artists such as jazz singer Cleo Laine and calypsonian Mighty Terror. A huge success, it became an annual event sponsored by the Gazette.

A person with short curly hair holds a lit cigarette near their mouth against a plain background.

British jazz singer Cleo Laine was among the performers at the first London Carnival in 1959 | Credit: Getty Images

The Gazette, though, was unable to turn a profit. Circulation flatlined by late 1959, and advertisers often paid late. “Looking back, it seems preposterous that the only coherent voice from the black community in Britain was a monthly paper that was so strapped for cash, it often could not find the £100 to pay the printers,” noted Hinds.

Though the stress affected Jones’s health, she refused to slow down. Then, on Christmas Eve 1964, she suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of just 49. “When Claudia died, a great hole was ripped in the fabric of our society,” said Hinds. “The black community was widowed.”

Grief-stricken after Jones’s death, Manu couldn’t continue with the Gazette, and the April–May 1965 issue was its last. By then, it had proved to be a rich incubator of talent. Civil rights, black power and decolonisation movements gained traction, and Gazette writers were among the founders of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement. Even today, the revolutionary spirit Jones kindled in the offices above a Brixton record store continues to inspire an extraordinary and enduring legacy.

Yvonne Singh is the author of INK! From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists who Transformed Britain (The History Press, 2025)

This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine