Guest speaker announced for Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2026
Nesrine Malik, Guardian columnist, has been announced as the guest speaker for the 2026 Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture.
Each Black History Month, the NUJ Black Members' Council organises an annual lecture in honour of Claudia Jones, the pioneering radical journalist and activist.
This year’s event will be hosted by the NUJ Guardian chapel and will take place at the Guardian's London office on Tuesday 20 October. Malik's lecture, titled 'Expanding Horizons: The Black Diaspora Story and the Media Backlash Against Equity', will focus on “the Black diaspora and our right to our stories and experiences, and the value and challenge of that in a white-curated media environment in the throes of backlash against racial equity.”
Claudia Jones was an excellent journalist and internationally renowned activist who worked to link the theories of Black liberation to practical action.
She was born in in Trinidad in 1915 and migrated with her family to New York where she encountered poverty and discrimination that limited her career choices and prevented her from attending college.
In 1936, Jones joined the Young Communist League USA and began writing for their newspaper the Weekly Review, before becoming editor-in-chief of the publication. Jones and her family were deported in 1955 for her political activities as a communist party member, a Black nationalist and a feminist.
Having been refused entry to Trinidad, Jones settled in the UK where she established the country's first Black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, and co-founded the Notting Hill Carnival.
The annual lecture in her honour will be held between 7pm to 8:30pm at The Guardian, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU. For further information, please register to attend through the NUJ website. Please note that tickets are free but open to NUJ members only.
