In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 / Talking Back to the State: Claudia Jones’s Radical Forms of Alienage “Your Honor, there are a few things I wish to say.” —claudia jones, from her “Speech to the Court, 1953” C. L. R. James was not the only Trinidad-born black radical housed in what became informally termed the “McCarran wing” of Ellis Island. Two separate times the writer, journalist, and communist activist Claudia Jones was imprisoned there—first briefly in 1948 by warrant for deportation under the 1918 Immigration Act, and then two years later for eighteen days under the McCarran Act, or Internal Security Act, of 1950. Jones’s imprisonment at the institution did not, however, lead directly to deportation as in the case of James. Instead, her path would take a more circuitous and ultimately even more repressive turn. After being arrested and imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1950, she was arrested again a year later, then a fourth time, when she was finally put on trial in 1953 along with twelve other Communist Party members. She was found guilty under the Smith Act (1940) of “conspiracy to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the Government.”1 At the time, communism was defined as just that, and as such, active membership in the Communist Party, as in the case of Jones, was criminalized and the basis for excluding and removing all aliens, as well as denying them legal permanent residence and naturalization. Jones was subsequently sentenced to a women’s federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia, where she served nine and a half months of a yearlong sentence. Upon her release, and suffering from a serious and long-standing heart ailment, she was deported as an “undesirable alien” under the McCarran-Walter Act. Initially, Jones was to be sent to Trinidad , but by agreeing to give up her fight against deportation, she was 164 / peripheral forms allowed to “voluntarily” depart instead for England, where she would spend the final nine years of her life in London continuing her writing and her activism before dying at the age of only forty-nine. Like in the case of Bulosan and Wright (who died at age forty-five and fifty-two, respectively), Jones’s untimely death was attributable in no small measure to the persistent persecution and harassment she faced by the U.S. government. Jones’s deportation in 1955 ended a life in the United States that had begun thirty-one years earlier when she first arrived from Trinidad in 1924 at the age of eight, initially entering through Ellis Island, as her alien registration form shows. Jones applied for U.S. citizenship in 1938; as she adds in a postscript to the brief epistolary autobiography she wrote to the then chairman of the CPUSA, William Foster: “At the age of 23, I applied and received my certificate for first papers for American citizenship but this was denied me by the U.S. government since I was politically active from the age of 18.”2 Her request for citizenship would be delayed for the next seventeen years—even after Jones married Abraham Scholnick, a U.S. citizen—before eventually being denied.3 As it had for James, Jones’s alien status made her especially vulnerable not only to the Smith Act but also to the even more repressive McCarran-Walter Act, which, as I discussed in the previous chapter, granted the state broad power to deport any of the 2.5 million aliens residing in the United States at the time for a variety of activities, including those that were legal at the time they were committed. In transitioning from James to Jones, one is immediately struck by the numerous parallels in their two experiences (e.g., both Trinidadian immigrants, radical Marxists, political and labor organizers, prominent Marxist and anticolonial intellectuals, prisoners on Ellis Island, deportees under the McCarran Act), parallels that make the lack of critical attention paid in the United States to Jones, as opposed to James, all the more glaring (notwithstanding the groundbreaking scholarship of Carole Boyce Davies, as well as more recent work by Dayo Gore, Erik McDuffie, and Cheryl Higashida).4 Jones’s neglect, as Davies has so compellingly shown, testifies to the twice-marginalized voices of black women within the radical Left in the United States—to what Davies has termed the silencing “of the radical black female subject from U.S. political consciousness.”5 Indeed, as a black, feminist, communist, antiimperialist , West Indian immigrant, Jones occupied a series...

Share