February 20, 2021

Daily Express/Pictorial Parade, Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

By Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

"A people's art is the genesis of their freedom."

— Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian activist, writer and editor who brought Carnival to London

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For the Caribbean diaspora living in London, there may never have been a quieter weekend than the one in August 2020 that normally would have seen the Notting Hill Carnival.

England has no shortage of full-sensory festival experiences, from music in Glastonbury to Diwali celebrations in Leicester. But there's nothing quite like visiting the Notting Hill Carnival. You exit the tube station, get off the bus or dismount your bike, and enter the irresistible hum of the celebrations, stepping off the pavement and onto the road.

Sometimes called "the biggest street party in Europe," Notting Hill Carnival is centered around the music, food and culture of the Caribbean diaspora.

But it has its roots as a site of anti-racist resistance and rebellion, right back to the founding of the original Caribbean Carnival in 1959 by a Trinidadian activist, writer and editor named Claudia Jones.

Jones brought her iteration of Carnival to London in another time when people desperately needed it.

The first "Caribbean Carnival" was held indoors in the dead of winter in January 1959, after a series of protests by Black Brits in areas of England, including Notting Hill, against police violence.

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These protests played out against the backdrop of the migration to England of the "Windrush" generation: the mass wave of nonwhite immigration to Britain in the postwar period.

Jones was an atypical member of the Windrush generation.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1915, she lived in Harlem for 30 years before arriving in London in 1955. Her journey to her life there featured many hardships: She had been afflicted by tuberculosis as a teenager and she was imprisoned in the United States under the McCarran Internal Security Act for her political work with the Communist Party before ultimately being exiled to Britain.

After a "lukewarm reception," as Jones' biographer Carole Boyce Davies described it, from the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was not receptive to Jones' antiracism efforts, Jones decided to turn her formidable organizational skills to uplifting the Black British community.

Alongside the activist Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jones co-founded one of the first major Black British newspapers, The West Indian Gazette (known as WIG) in 1958. By January 1959, she had set up the Caribbean Carnival, an indoor event at London's St Pancras Town Hall. Sponsored by WIG and televised by the BBC, the carnival featured an array of elements including dancing, music and a Caribbean Carnival Queen beauty pageant.

The carnival ran annually until her death in 1964, after which it was "paused" in 1965 in her honor before returning to the streets in 1966.

Colin Prescod, a Black history archivist and sociologist whose mother, the actress and singer Pearl Prescod, was a close friend of Jones's, moved to Notting Hill as a child from Trinidad and still lives there today. Mr. Prescod takes the view that there was an area-wide anti-racist consciousness in Notting Hill that made it a fertile ground for the development of Carnival.

"I think the North Kensington area entered a proto-Black Lives Matter movement," he said of the area in the late 1950s. These sentiments were further solidified after the May 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane, an aspiring law student and carpenter from Antigua, who was stabbed to death by a gang of white people in Notting Hill.

"Notting Hill Carnival was one of the most beautiful means of protest," said Fiona Compton, a St. Lucian historian, photographer and Carnival ambassador based in Britain. Jones "looked at many different ways of trying to make changes in society and she realized Carnival was the way because it showed that we create joy, too."

With Carnival, Jones sparked a wave of solidarity among Black Brits. Her forward-thinking attitude toward community organizing through celebration still echoes in recent attempts to position Black joy as an act of resistance and resilience.

From these beginnings, Carnival evolved into an inclusive annual street party, thanks to the artists and organizers who followed Jones's lead. In 1966, Rhaune Laslett, a community leader in Notting Hill, revived the festival as the Notting Hill Fayre, which brought Russell Henderson's steel-pan band in to the streets, in an impromptu performance that is said to have launched the Carnival procession we know today. Leslie Palmer, an activist from Trinidad, introduced Jamaican sound systems to Carnival in 1973, which drew in the larger crowds and opened the festival up beyond the traditions of the eastern Caribbean islands.

In 2020, those days of celebration in Notting Hill were, for the first time in decades, silent. It was an especially difficult blow, given yet another summer of protests for racial equity and a pandemic that, in Britain, has disproportionately affected the Black British Caribbean community. As Notting Hill Carnival now takes place in August, there is still hope that Carnival might happen in 2021. But either way, its spirit persists. For Black Brits, it is "our Mecca," in Ms. Compton's words, or "our Christmas," as a friend described it to me on Twitter.

Last year was a quiet one, and a hard one. But Carnival will rise once again. And when it does, I have no doubt that, with the knowledge in our hearts that Carnival can be a political space and a celebration of resilience and renewal, we'll return to the streets as energized and radicalized as Claudia Jones would have wished.

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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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