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Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. By Carole Boyce Davies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xxviii, 311 pp. Cloth, $79.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4096-6. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4116-1.)
On December 9, 1955, Claudia Jones, a leading black Communist activist, writer, journalist, and political theorist, left New York City for London on the ss Queen Elizabeth. Jones had been indicted, imprisoned, and ultimately deported under the Smith and McCarran-Walters acts, and this journey to Britain began a life of forced exile from the United States that, according to Carole Boyce Davies, mirrors Jones's exclusion from political and intellectual histories of the American left, black radicalism, black feminism, and the freedom struggles of the 1930s-1960s. Using a range of Jones's writings, including articles and columns published in the Daily Worker, poetry, and short autobiographical...