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.”

“Is this not a tyrannical violation of the American dream of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’,” she demanded.

Excerpts from this historic statement, which Jones made before she was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, can be heard at a memorial gathering next month to mark the 70th anniversary of its making as well as Jones’s birthday, which also falls in February.

Claire Holder, lawyer and former director of the Notting Hill Carnival, will perform the reading.

Organised by the Communist Party of Britain, the event was inaugurated as an annual gathering last year and takes place at Jones’s final resting place in Highgate cemetery in London.

Among the speakers this year will be party general secretary Robert Griffiths, Caribbean Labour Solidarity president Luke Daniels and journalist and activist Roger McKenzie. The meeting will be chaired by Communist Party chair Ruth Styles.

Joining them on the podium will be Winston Pinder, one of the few people alive today who knew the Trinidad-born activist.

Pinder was a member of the Communist Party welcome group sent to meet her at Victoria station following her deportation from the US in December 1955 shortly after her release from prison.

He worked closely with Jones, who would go on to play a pivotal role in the anti-racism struggle in Britain, particularly in the aftermath of the 1958 Notting Hill riots.

A brilliant organiser, orator and writer, she also set up the West Indian Gazette newspaper to serve as a campaign platform for social justice and anti-imperialist campaigns in Britain and abroad.

In 1964, Jones died of a heart attack aged only 49 at her home not far from Highgate cemetery, her health broken by four incarcerations in US jails.

At her request, her ashes were interred next to Karl Marx’s tomb following her funeral at Golders Green, but a headstone was never erected.

It was Pinder who led the campaign to raise money for one in 1984.

The Cuban embassy was among those that contributed to the fund and its current ambassador, Barbara Montalvo Alvarez, attended last year’s inaugural event.

David Horsley, author of  The Political Life and Times of Claudia Jones, said: “As a pioneering anti-racist, a fighter against colonialism and imperialism, for the unity of a multiracial working class, Claudia was above all a communist — so it is fitting that the Communist Party have decided to commemorate and celebrate the life and work of Jones on an annual basis.”

The Claudia Jones memorial event starts noon, February 18, at Highgate cemetery (east side), Swain’s Lane, London N6 6PJ.