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Join memorial to Claudia Jones to mark day of historic speech
ANGELA COBBINAH invites readers to help commemorate the 70th anniversary of the legendary black communist’s moving statement at the end of her nine-month US trial when she was found guilty of sedition

IN February 1953, following years of being hounded by the FBI and subjected to a string of arrests and imprisonments, Claudia Jones gave the speech of her life at the end of a nine-month trial in New York in which she and 12 other fellow communists were found guilty of sedition.

As the civil rights leader made an inventory of US injustices, she stated that she had been found guilty of fighting for the “full unequivocal equality for my people,” opposing the “bestial Korean war” and being “a member and an officer of the Communist Party.”

These were not criminal acts, she boldly declared, but the “advocacy of ideas.”

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