Claude Mckay
(1890-1948)

Though not a native American, Jamaican born Claude McKay was one of the most prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance. His "If We Must Die" was published in the Liberator in 1919, making it one of the very first poems initiating the tone, subject, and matter of the literary movement. Here are a few lines from the text:

"If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, . . .
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"

The content of "If We Must Die" is revolutionary--a quality evident in much of McKay's writing. As the poem suggests, McKay believed it to be a poet's duty to politically inform and agitate the minds of the people. During his lifetime, he often spoke out against and wrote about the institutionalized racism of governments in some of the world's most powerful countries. America and England were two of his more popular targets. He traveled from Jamaica visiting numerous places such as America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. During his travels, he could not help but observe and study the oppression of different peoples and attempt his best to advocate political change.

His political ideas were exemplified early in his literary career by the presence of dialect and island culture in his poetry. They also appeared in his fiction in which he often captured the working class black who struggled to make it in his allotted life. His novels include "Home to Harlem" (1929), "Banjo" (1929), and "Banana Bottom" (1933). In 1937, McCay published his autobiography, "A Long Way from Home". It was the culmination of his life as a political activist, novelist, essayist and poet. McKay died a few years later at the age of 58.(Schoener, 1969)

To his credit, he influenced several other Harlem Renaissance artists, such as Langston Hughes, and he is considered one of the main stimulators of the Negritude Movement . The Negritude Movement was another literary movement whose proponents tried to classify a black-based/African-based aesthetic founded on what the writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance created. McKay's poetry was published in several volumes. Some are "Songs of Jamaica" (1912), "Constab Ballads" (1912), "Spring in New Hampshire" (1920) and "Harlem Shadows" (1922).