Claudia Jones Quotes

racist ideas, so integral a part of the desperate drive by the men of Wall Street to war and fascism

And this, Honourable Judge, is exactly what is the purpose of all Smith Act trials, this one in particular. I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my c –defendants that America’s working people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win and that the decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept from the scene of history.

if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.

It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”.

Will you measure as worth of one year’s sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a Communist I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class? A year for another vital Communist belief, that the bestial Korean War is an unjust war? Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations can be achieved and peace won if struggled for? Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation of and by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial resources of the nation be harnessed for the well-being of the people? Still another year’s sentence for my belief that the denial of the exercise of free speech and thought to Communists only precedes, as history confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans?

I find now, as throughout this trial of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, that it is we, the defendants, who are morally free and conversely it is the prosecutors and the Court itself that stands naked before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the people of our country.

I had early experience experiences which are shared by millions of native-born Negroes — the bitter indignity and humiliation of second-class citizenship, the special status which makes a mockery of our Government’s prated claims of a “free America” in a “free world” for 15 million Negro Americans.

If, out of this struggle, history assesses that I and my co-defendants have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small indeed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honoured today in all lands for their contribution to social progress, will, just like the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the United States in that coming day.

I want to concur with Mr. Perry’s proposal to Mr. Lane that he recommend to the Department of Justice that they show more zeal, since they have not ever prosecuted a single anti-Semite or a Ku Kluxer in these United States with its total of 5,000 lynched Negro men, women and Children since the 1860s.

Marxism-Leninism — that philosophy that not only rejects racists ideas, but is the antithesis of them.

It was the world-renowned Karl Marx, founder of the Marxist-Leninist science, for which application to American and world historical conditions, we were so fearfully convicted, who long ago predicted that “The time would come when the powers that would be would no longer live by the very laws they themselves have fashioned.”

The thinking process, as your Honour well knows, is a process that defies jailing.

one of the historical truths of all history is that the oppressed never revere their oppressors.

A developing consciousness on the woman question today, therefore, must not fail to recognize that the Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive women's movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness.

One thought pervaded me throughout this trial and pervades me still, and it is this: In the nine and one half months of this trial, millions of children have been born. I speak only of those who live. Will the future oft those children, including those of our defendants and even you Honour’s grandchildren, be made more secure by the jailing of 13 men and women Communists whose crimes are not criminal acts but advocacy of ideas? Is this not a tyrannical violation of the American dream of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?