02/20/2024
Press Contact:
Dante O’Hara, Ph. D.
Organizing Director
[email protected]
760-521-9397
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Claudia Jones School for Political Education Celebrates 4th Year Anniversary Following 109th Birthday of Claudia Jones
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Claudia Jones School for Political Education will be gathering at the Embassy of Nicaragua (1527 New Hampshire Ave. NW) on Saturday, February 24, 2024 to celebrate its fourth year anniversary. The gathering falls a few days after the 109th birthday of Claudia Jones herself, who was deported from the United States in the 1950s for her outspoken convictions on peace and democracy, particularly the fight against racism, patriarchy, and imperialist war. The theme of this year’s anniversary gathering will be Black and Palestinian solidarity, reflecting the ongoing struggle to win a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to end the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The program will feature prominent academics, Howard University Professor Carole Boyce-Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, and Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, as well as Ph. D. student Momodou Taal. This first panel will link Claudia Jones’s political work and life with that of the Palestinian people today as well as tying other prominent Black political figures who expressed solidarity with Palestinians like the late Kwame Ture.
The keynote panel will be followed by local Black and Palestinian performers performing song, poetry by High Priestess of Poetry Abena Disroe, and dance. The main musical performance will be led by local Black woman artist, Veronica Faison and followed by a Palestinian resistance dance called “Dabke” led by Malikat (Queens) of Dabke.
“This year’s anniversary event will be historic. For one, we will be returning to our roots and coming back home to the Nicaraguan Embassy where we held our first in-person event in 2020 right before doors closed for the pandemic. And two, we are expecting a large crowd of all the movements we have participated in and led throughout the District. The celebration of the School and Claudia’s life is important to continue to fight for democracy and socialism as part of her legacy,” says Dante O’Hara, organizing director of the Claudia Jones School.
Claudia Vera Cumberbatch Jones (1915-1964) was an immigrant from Trinidad and lived in Harlem, NY for most of her life. She joined the Young Communist League and eventually the Communist Party USA, being partly influenced by the party’s struggle for African American equality through its efforts in the Scottsboro Case in Alabama. She became a prominent journalist and theoretician, leading her to publish the influential work An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! which characterized the exploitation of Black women as “triple oppression” – oppressed because she is a woman, because she is Black, and because she is a worker. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Claudia was arrested over a dozen times for giving political speeches and for eventually violating the anti-democratic Smith Act and Walter-McCarran Act. Due to poor health, she did not spend much time in prison and was eventually deported to London where she spent the rest of her life organizing the West Indian community there until her death in 1964.
The Claudia Jones School for Political Education was founded in 2020 to build on Claudia’s legacy in relating her contributions to our struggle for democracy in Washington, D.C. Claudia spoke to the special responsibilities as people in the United States by recognizing that it is the imperialists of this land that are responsible for war and exploitation all across the globe and the rise of fascism. The colonial occupation of historic Palestinian lands, stolen in 1948 and further occupied in 1967, has a close relationship to the founding and near genocide of the Indigenous population prior to the founding and expansion of the United States. The system of Jim Crow that lasted from the end of the Reconstruction period up to the 1960s is instituted in Israel and its occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem while simultaneously instituting a siege on the Gaza strip—a land, air, and sea blockade where Gazans basically function within an open air prison or concentration camp which has now become a “killing cage” since the events of October 7.
In 1951, Black lawyer and Communist, William L Patterson along with members of the short-lived Civil Rights Congress submitted a petition to the United Nations charging the United States government with genocide of the African American people. The petition provided detailed documentation of lynchings, murders, and practices that constitutes genocide. This petition’s findings are eerily similar to the case brought forward recently by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
This is why at our upcoming February 24 anniversary, we plan on emphasizing the importance of Black-Palestinian solidarity in this time of struggle and grief. When Black Lives Matter protests were in the streets following the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014, Palestinians who stood with them, taught them about the repressive tactics of police and exposed the ADL’s deadly exchange program which has US police departments train with Israeli occupation forces. The same police that oppress and occupy Black neighborhoods in the United States are cut from the same cloth that institute an apartheid system in occupied Palestine that deems Palestinians and darker-skinned peoples as second or third-class citizens.
TO ATTEND: VISIT INVITE PAGE @
http://tinyurl.com/claudiajonesschoolanniversary
DOORS OPEN at 1:00PM
PROGRAM @ 1:30 pm
Food Served
$10
Come celebrate the 4th anniversary of The Claudia Jones School for Political Education!
