Intellectual setting
Jones organized within the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front and early Cold War periods, was tried and imprisoned under the Smith Act, and was deported to Britain in 1955, where she founded the West Indian Gazette and organized events that became a precursor of the Notting Hill Carnival amid Caribbean migration and racial violence in 1950s London.
Key ideas
Triple oppression
Jones argued that Black working-class women face compounded, mutually reinforcing oppression by race, class, and gender, and that because of this position they are a leading, not peripheral, political force whose demands and leadership the wider left had persistently neglected.
Anti-colonial Black internationalism
Jones linked the struggles of African Americans, Caribbean colonial subjects, and anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia as a single global struggle against racial capitalism and imperialism, rather than as separate national problems.
Legacy
Jones's account of the intersecting oppressions facing Black women anticipated later intersectional feminist theory and remains cited in Black feminist and Marxist-feminist scholarship, while her organizing in Britain helped found Caribbean-British political journalism and community culture.