Saturday, February 20, 2021

In Her Words: ‘We create joy, too’

Claudia Jones brought her iteration of Carnival to London.
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.

Read the full article here.

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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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On Politics: Cruz and Cuomo Face Scandal. Trump Can’t Save Them.

Without Trump dominating the conversation, audacious behavior isn't so quickly subsumed.
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By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host. (And apologies — because of a technological issue, an earlier version of this newsletter sent out last night's newsletter again.)

Senator Ted Cruz returning to Texas from Cancún, Mexico, on Thursday.Reuters

Even by Washington standards, this has been a particularly shameless week.

With millions of Texans freezing in their homes, Senator Ted Cruz fled to a Mexican beach, offering his constituents little more than the political cliché of wanting to be a "good dad." (Apparently, flying your daughters to Cancún is just like car-pooling — if your minivan were the Ritz-Carlton resort.)

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas blamed the complete meltdown of state infrastructure not on a lack of preparation from leaders in the state but on the Green New Deal — a liberal policy proposal that is not even close to becoming law.

His predecessor, former Gov. Rick Perry, suggested that Texans would willingly endure days of blackouts to keep the "federal government out of their business." It seems hard to believe that any Texan — or really any human — would choose to have to melt snow for water.

The outrageous behavior extended beyond the Lone Star State. In New York, a state lawmaker said that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had vowed to "destroy" him for criticizing Mr. Cuomo's handling of the deaths of nursing home residents in the past year — an issue that is under investigation by the Justice Department.

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And Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, said the armed attack on the Capitol didn't seem all that well-armed. Apparently, he missed the many, many videos of attackers carrying guns, bats and other weapons.

And yet, beneath all this noise was the sound of something even more unusual: silence.

For much of the past six years, former President Donald J. Trump has dominated the political conversation, prompting days of outrage, finger-pointing and general news cycle havoc with nearly every tweet. The audacious behavior of other politicians was often lost amid Mr. Trump's obsessive desire to dominate the coverage.

Well, the former president has now gone nearly silent, leaving a Trump-size void in our national conversation that President Biden has little desire to fill. That's been a rude awakening for some other politicians, who find themselves suddenly enmeshed in controversy that isn't quickly subsumed in a deluge of Trump news.

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It's unclear whether any will pay a significant political price for their actions. The last administration delivered a constant stream of chaos that may have fundamentally reshaped the kind of fact-based rhetoric and norm-abiding behavior we expect from our political leaders. Already, some politicians have adopted Mr. Trump's playbook for surviving controversy: Blame liberals, double down and never admit any mistake.

Mr. Biden, at least, seems determined to set a different tone. T.J. Ducklo, a deputy press secretary who reportedly used abusive and sexist language with a female reporter, resigned last Saturday — reflecting Mr. Biden's Inauguration Day promise that he would fire anyone he heard being disrespectful.

And in his first presidential town hall on Tuesday, Mr. Biden repeatedly used two words that many in Washington haven't heard in a while:

"I'm sorry."

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Democrats in Disarray. Kind of?

After a few weeks of party unity, Democrats are showing some fresh signs of division.

Over the past week, Mr. Biden indicated that he was not fully sold on two proposals backed by his progressive base: forgiving $50,000 of student debt for each borrower and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Both plans have some high-profile champions. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have called on Mr. Biden to use his executive authority to cancel about 80 percent of the student loan debt run up by about 36 million borrowers. And the party is fairly united over a $15 minimum wage, with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont committed to including it in the Covid-19 relief package currently making its way through Congress.

The issue for Democrats is how quickly to move. Mr. Biden favors a more gradual phase-in of the $15 minimum wage, in part to assuage concerns from business owners. And on student debt, Mr. Biden is not convinced that he can erase so much with a stroke of his executive pen. He's also signaled that the proposals should include income caps.

"My daughter went to Tulane University and then got a master's at Penn; she graduated $103,000 in debt," he said at a CNN town hall on Tuesday. "I don't think anybody should have to pay for that, but I do think you should be able to work it off."

Mr. Biden may simply be looking at some political realities. Polls indicate that both proposals are popular, though support for a $15 wage drops when voters are told of potential economic effects — like a Congressional Budget Office forecast that it could cost more than one million jobs. As for student debt, majorities back the $50,000 in relief, but support rises when the plan is targeted at lower-income families.

By the numbers: 16

… That was the number of crossover districts — congressional districts where the two parties split results between the presidency and Congress — in 2020, according to a new analysis by Daily Kos. That's the lowest number in a century.

If you've found this newsletter helpful, please consider subscribing to The New York Times. Your support makes our work possible.

… Seriously

"It's kind of a denial of the hard times. That's where the florist steps in." It's a good time to be in the flower business.

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posted by Goatz @ 5:00 AM   0 comments