The Hon. Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, known to friends and family as Decca (September 11, 1917 – July 22, 1996), self-described muckraker and political radical, was the "red sheep" of the noted Mitford sisters, daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles, daughter of MP Thomas Bowles.

Childhood and adolescence
In 1939, Romilly and Mitford immigrated to the United States. They travelled around, working odd jobs, perpetually short of cash. At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C. and considered joining him once he was posted to England. After miscarriages, she gave birth to another daughter, Anne Constancia ("Dinky") Romilly on 9 February 1941. Her husband went missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a successful bombing raid over Nazi Germany. She took months to accept that he was dead.
Mitford threw herself into war work. Through this, she met and married the American civil rights lawyer Robert Edward Treuhaft in 1943 and eventually settled in Oakland, California. There the couple had two sons, Nicholas, who was killed when hit by a bus while he was riding his bicycle in 1955, and Benjamin. Mitford approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely".

Life in America and motherhood
Mitford and Treuhaft became active members of the Communist Party during the Red Scare and, in 1953, they were both summoned to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both refused to testify about their participation in radical groups. Feeling that in the current political climate they could do more for social justice outside the Party, and disillusioned by the development of Communism in the Soviet Union, Mitford and Treuhaft resigned from it in late 1958. Evidently Jessica had to become a United States citizen or she would have been unceremoniously deported, regardless of her husband's citizenship.
In 1960 Mitford published her first book Hons and Rebels (American title: Daughters and Rebels), a memoir covering her youth in the Redesdale household.

Communism
In May 1961 she travelled to Montgomery, Alabama while working on an article about Southern attitudes for Esquire. While there, she and a friend went to meet the arrival of the Freedom Riders and became caught up in a riot when a mob led by the Ku Klux Klan attacked the civil rights activists. After the riot, Mitford proceeded on to a rally at a church led by Martin Luther King, Jr.. This too was attacked by the Klan and Mitford spent the night barricaded inside the church with the civil rights group until the violence was ended by the National Guard.
During this period, her daughter, Constancia Romilly, became the companion of the African-American activist James Forman, by whom she had two sons, James Robert Lumumba Forman and Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman.

Investigative journalism
Author J. K. Rowling has indicated that Jessica Mitford has been a heroine of hers since age 14, and that her daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes is named after Mitford. She reviewed Mitford's book of letters, Decca, in the Sunday Telegraph.

J.K. Rowling and Mitford
Mitford's second autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict describes her comic experiences joining and eventually leaving the Communist Party USA. Mitford titled the book after what, in her youth, she thought were the lyrics to the Communist anthem, The Internationale, which actually is "Tis the final conflict".
Mitford was invited to join the Communist Party in the book by her co-worker Dobby, to whom she responded "We thought you'd never ask!" She bristled against the conservative structure in the CP, at one point upsetting the Women's caucus by printing a poster with "Girls! Girls! Girls!" to draw people to a CP event. She merciliously teased an elder Communist about his paranoia when he wrote out the name of a town where she could get chickens donated from "loyal party members" for a fundraiser. When Moody wrote Petaluma on a scrap of paper to avoid being overheard by possible bugs, she asked in jest how the chickens should be prepared, and wrote, "Fried or Broiled".

A Fine Old Conflict
(Compare this with the traditional justification of journalism, originated by Finley Peter Dunne: "To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.")

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty."
"Objectivity? I've always had an objective."
(On seeing the Pyramids) "Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control."
When Evelyn Waugh wrote in a review of The American Way of Death that Mitford did not have "a plainly stated attitude to death," Mitford asked her sister Deborah to tell Waugh, "Of course I'm against it." Bibliography

Extracts from Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford were dramatized for Book of the Week, BBC Radio 4, five 15-minute programmes broadcast in November 2006. The readers were Rosamund Pike and Tom Chadbon; the producer was Chris Wallis.