Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies.
Claudia Vera Cumberbatch, who would later become known to history as Claudia Jones, was born on 21 February 1915 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, then a colony within the British West Indies.
Her birth into a British colonial Caribbean society, marked by racial hierarchy and limited economic opportunity for Black families, would profoundly shape the political consciousness she developed later in life. The Cumberbatch family's eventual emigration to the United States in search of better prospects placed young Claudia at the intersection of Caribbean, African American, and immigrant experience — a positioning that later informed her groundbreaking analysis of the 'triple oppression' faced by Black women along lines of race, gender, and class.
Though she spent most of her working life first in Harlem and then in London, Jones's Trinidadian origins remained central to her identity and activism, particularly in her later work founding the West Indian Gazette and organizing Caribbean carnivals in Britain, both of which drew on her deep connection to Caribbean culture and diasporic community-building.
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