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Claudia Jones
Deported by one country and admitted by another as its subject, she gave Black Britain a paper and a carnival.
The rise
Born Claudia Vera Cumberbatch on 21 February 1915 in Belmont, Port of Spain, she was brought to Harlem at eight into tenement damp that left her with the tuberculosis she never shook. The Scottsboro case took her into the Young Communist League at eighteen, and she rose to edit the American party's women's pages.
What they did
Convicted under the Smith Act in 1951, jailed at Alderson and deported in 1955, she landed in Britain on 21 December, a British subject with nowhere else to go. In March 1958 she founded the West Indian Gazette above a Brixton barber's shop. After the Notting Hill attacks she staged a Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959, televised by the BBC.
The full picture
She held the party line through the Stalin years and never publicly broke with it: she toured the Soviet Union in 1962, reached China and Tokyo's anti-bomb conference in 1964, and defended Beijing's nuclear programme in her paper. The street carnival began in 1966 under Rhaune Laslett; her 1959 hall event is its ancestor.
Why it matters
Expelled as a subversive, taken in only because the empire still counted her as its own, she built in six years the press and the festival that organise Black British public life to this day.
“A people's art is the genesis of their freedom.”