Claudia Jones - Deportation

Deportation

An elected member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), she also organised and spoke at events. As a result of her membership of CPUSA and various associated activities, in 1948 Jones was arrested and sentenced to the first of four spells in prison. Incarcerated on Ellis Island, she was threatened with being deported to Trinidad.

Following a hearing by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she was found in violation of the McCarran Act for being an alien (non-U.S. citizen) who had joined the Communist Party. Several witnesses testified to her role in party activities, and she had identified herself as a party member since 1936 when completing her Alien Registration on 24 December 1940, in conformity with the Alien Registration Act. She was ordered deported on 21 December 1950.

In 1951, when only 36 and in prison, she suffered her first heart attack. That same year, she was tried and convicted with eleven others, including her friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, of "un-American activities" under the Smith Act, specifically activities against the United States government. The Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal. In 1955, Jones began her sentence of a year and a day at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She was released on 23 October 1955.

She was refused entry to Trinidad and Tobago, in part because the British colonial governor Major General Sir Hubert Elvin Rance considered that "she may prove troublesome". She was eventually offered residency in the United Kingdom on humanitarian grounds, and federal authorities agreed to allow that when she agreed to cease contesting her deportation. On 7 December 1955, at Harlem's Hotel Theresa, 350 people met to see her off.