Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American poet best known for his radical sonnet “If We Must Die,” one of the most militant and enduring poems associated with the Harlem Renaissance. McKay, a key figure in the movement, was often regarded as the artistic counterpart to Marcus Garvey, sharing his fierce affirmation of Black pride and resistance
Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, Jamaica, on September 15, 1890. His parents proudly claimed Malagasy and Ashanti ancestry and instilled in him a strong sense of racial pride and a deep connection to his African heritage. Under the tutelage of his elder brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied poetry and philosophy. Jekyll encouraged him to write in his native Jamaican dialect and to stop mimicking English poets, a shift that shaped his early verse.
At age seventeen, McKay left Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown’s Town, but he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital. In Kingston, he encountered extensive racism, probably for the first time in his life. His native Sunny Ville was overwhelmingly Black, whereas Kingston was predominantly European. In the city, Black people were treated as inferior and relegated to menial roles. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the bigoted society and, within a year, returned home to Sunny Ville.
During his brief stays in Brown’s Town and Kingston, McKay continued writing poetry, blending his African pride with his love of English poetic forms. Back in Sunny Ville, and with Jekyll’s encouragement and financial support, he published his first two collections of dialect poems, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. For Songs of Jamaica, McKay received an award and stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, which he used to finance a trip to the United States. In 1912, he arrived in South Carolina, then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied for approximately two months before transferring to Kansas State College. His time in Kansas coincided with a period of intense Ku Klux Klan activity in the region, and in 1914, he moved to New York, eventually settling in Harlem.
As in Kingston, McKay confronted racism in New York City, and that experience further compelled him to write. He became active in radical politics and, in 1917, published poems under the pseudonym “Eli Edwards” in the periodical Seven Arts. His verse attracted the attention of critic and editor Frank Harris, who helped place McKay’s work in Pearson’s Magazine. Among McKay’s poems from this period is To the White Fiends, a vitriolic challenge to European oppressors and bigots. A few years later, McKay befriended Max Eastman, a socialist editor of the magazine Liberator, which published McKay’s best-known piece of work, If We Must Die, in its July 1919 issue.
If We Must Die was written amid the violence and bloodshed that swept the United States during 1919, a year that came to be known as the “Red Summer.” It was a period marked by an upsurge in race riots and anti-Black pogroms carried out by Euro-American mobs against Black communities in cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and the rural town of Elaine, Arkansas. In Chicago, for example, on July 27, 1919, a Black teenager, Eugene Williams, accidentally drifted into a European-only area of Lake Michigan; he was stoned and drowned, and the incident sparked nearly two weeks of violence. By the time the rioting ended, dozens were dead, hundreds were injured, and hundreds of Black families had lost their homes.
With his sonnet, McKay urges his community to face death with dignity and to fight back against murderous attacks. The poem exploded across the American psyche, resonating as a powerful call to resistance. McKay named Euro-American aggressors for what they were, a “murderous, cowardly pack”, and demanded courage from African Americans in confronting oppression and victimization. The sonnet operates as a call to arms, advocating militant self-defense in the struggle to protect Black lives and communities.
After its original publication in the July 1919 issue of Liberator, If We Must Die ” became widely known. It appeared in the pages of political advocate Cyril Briggs’ Crusader magazine and labour leader A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger, as well as in numerous anthologies throughout the 1920s.
McKay soon left the United States for two years of European travel. He spent part of 1919 in Holland and Belgium, then moved to London and worked with Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical periodical Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1920, he published his third verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which included Harlem Shadows, a poem about the plight of Black prostitutes in a harsh urban environment. McKay later used Harlem Shadows as the title of a subsequent collection that broadened this symbolic indictment of the degradation of Black life under capitalism and racism.
After returning to the United States in 1921, McKay involved himself in a range of social and political causes. In 1922, he published Harlem Shadows, gathering poems from earlier volumes and periodicals; the collection contained many of his most acclaimed works—including If We Must Die—and secured his reputation as a leading voice of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance. McKay capitalized on this acclaim by redoubling his efforts on behalf of Black people and workers: he became active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, contributed articles to its paper Negro World, and traveled to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
Eventually, McKay moved to Paris, where he developed a severe respiratory illness and, at times, supported himself by working as an artist’s model. After hospitalization and recovery, he resumed his travels, spending what would be eleven highly productive years in Europe and North Africa. During this period, he wrote three novels—Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom—as well as the short story collection Gingertown. Home to Harlem was the most commercially successful of the three, though all were taken seriously by critics, and the Gingertown stories, many set in Harlem, Jamaica, and North Africa, continued his exploration of Black exploitation and humiliation under racial regimes.
McKay returned to the United States in the mid-1930s and settled once more in Harlem. There he began work on his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, which recounts his experience of oppression as a Black man navigating a Eurocentric oppressive world. Over time, McKay underwent several significant shifts: he broke with Communism, converted to Catholicism, and in 1940 officially became an American citizen. His work with Catholic relief organizations in New York inspired the essay collection Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which offered a sociological portrait and critique of Harlem and its African-American community during the 1920s and 1930s.
McKay eventually moved to Chicago, where he worked as a teacher and community organiser within Catholic institutions. By the mid-1940s, his health had deteriorated severely; he suffered several illnesses and ultimately died of heart failure on May 22, 1948.
Many years after his death, McKay continues to be admired for his unwavering commitment to articulating the predicament of Black people and for devoting his art and life to social protest.
In 2012, a researcher working in Columbia University’s archives identified an unpublished McKay manuscript, the novel Amiable with Big Teeth, written in 1941. The typescript had actually been unearthed in 2009 by graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and after a lengthy authentication process, it was published in 2017, adding a major new work to McKay’s oeuvre and reshaping scholarly understandings of the Harlem Renaissance.
Source:
http://www.shmoop.com/if-we-must-die/
http://www.biography.com/people/claude-mckay-9392654#literary-career
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/claude-mckay
