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Festus Claudius " Claude" McKay OJ (September 15, 1890See Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner In The Harlem Renaissance (New York, Schocken, 1987) p. 377 n. 19. As Cooper's authoritative biography explains, McKay's family predated his birth a year to make him eligible to be a student teaching assistant at his eldest brother's school, a fact McKay only learned from his sister Rachel in 1920 -- leading some sources to erroneously date his birth to 1889. – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Born in Jamaica, McKay first travelled to the United States to attend college, and encountered W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk which stimulated McKay's interest in political involvement. He moved to New York City in 1914 and, in 1919, he wrote "If We Must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.
McKay also wrote five novels, Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), Harlem Glory (written in 1938-1940, published in 1990), Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (written in 1941, published in 2017), and a novella, Romance in Marseille (written in 1933, published in 2020).Felicia R. Lee, "New Novel of Harlem Renaissance Is Found", The New York Times, September 14, 2012.
Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979); and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labor organizing. His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953. His Complete Poems (2004) includes almost ninety pages of poetry written between 1923 and the late 1940s, most of it previously unpublished, a crucial addition to his poetic oeuvre.
McKay was introduced to British Fabian socialism in his teens by his elder brother and tutor Uriah Theodore, and after moving to the United States in his early 20s he encountered the American socialist left in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and through his membership in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — the only American left-labor organization of the era that was totally open to Negro members (as he comments), continuing the tradition of the populist People's Party of the previous generation. In the course of the teens he became acquainted with the writings of Marx and the programs of a variety of activists. As a co-editor of The Liberator magazine, he came into conflict with its hard-line Leninist doctrinaire editor Mike Gold, a contention which contributed to his leaving the magazine. In 1922–1923, he traveled to the Soviet Union to attend a Congress of the International, there encountering his friend Liberator publisher Max Eastman, a delegate to the Congress. In Russia, McKay was widely feted by the Communist Party. While there, he worked with a Russian writer to produce two books which were published in Russian, The Negroes of America (1923), a critical examination of American black-white racism from a Marxist class-conflict perspective, and Trial By Lynching (1925); translations of these books back into English appeared in 1979 and 1977 respectively; McKay's original English texts are apparently lost. In the Soviet Union, McKay eventually concluded that, as he says of a character in Harlem Glory, he "saw what he was shown." Realizing that he was being manipulated and used by the Party apparatus, and responding critically to the authoritarian bent of the Soviet regime, he left for Western Europe in 1923, first for Hamburg, then Paris, then the South of France, Barcelona and Morocco.
After his return to Harlem in 1934, he found himself in frequent contention with the Stalinist New York City Communist Party which sought to dominate the left politics and writing community of the decade. His prose masterpiece, A Long Way From Home, was attacked in the New York City press on doctrinaire Stalinist grounds. This conflict is reflected in Harlem: Negro Metropolis and satirized in Amiable With Big Teeth. His sonnet sequence, "The Cycle," published posthumously in the Complete Poems, deals at length with McKay's confrontation with the left political machine of the time. Increasingly ill in the mid-40s, he was rescued from extremely impoverished circumstances by a Catholic Worker friend and installed in a communal living situation; later in the decade, he converted to Catholic Church and died in 1948.Cooper, Wayne F. (1987), Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Louisiana State University Press, pp. 294–295.
At the age of four, McKay went to school at Mt. Zion Church. Around the age of nine, he was sent to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, also known as Theo, a teacher, to be given a proper education. His brother was also an amateur journalist. Due to his brother's influence, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science, and theology. In his free time, he would read poems, including Shakespeare. He started writing poetry of his own at the age of 10.
As a teenager in 1906, he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenda, maintaining his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met Walter Jekyll, a philosopher and folklorist, who became a mentor and an inspiration for him, who also encouraged him to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect, and set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. They were the first poems published in Jamaican Patois, a dialect of mainly English words and Twi (Ghanaian language) structure. McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads (1912), was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911.Freda Scott Giles, "Claude McKay's Life" , Modern American Poetry.
In the poem "The Tropics in New York", McKay reminisced about the Caribbean. The poem is set in New York and was written while McKay lived there as a laborer. The fruits he sees in New York make the speaker of the poem long for Jamaica, and thus Caribbean fruits are imagined as part of the New York cityscape. The colors of the fruit remind him of the colors and diversity in his native island and "hungry for old familiar ways / a wave of longing through my body wept".
McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. In 1918 McKay met Frank Harris, then editor of Pearson's Magazine. His avowal of writerly integrity had a lifelong effect for McKay, as he relates in his memoir, A Long Way From Home. Harris featured four poems and a short prose piece about his biography and poetics, in the September 1918 issue of the magazine, McKay's first prominent appearance in print. In 1919, McKay met Crystal Eastman and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator magazine, where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922. The Chicago Defender (National edition) (1921–1967); April 2, 1921; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender (1910-1975), p. 1. As co-editor of The Liberator, he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies.
In this period McKay joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He also became involved with a group of black Far left who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP. These included other Caribbean writers such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfred Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialism revolution. Together they founded a semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. In early fall 1919 McKay traveled to London, perhaps prompted by pressure from the Justice Department which was engaged in a nationwide attack on pacifists, socialists and labor organizers (the "Palmer Raids") which especially targeted the IWW.
In April 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a Racism article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled "", it insinuated gross hypersexuality in black people in general. Lansbury refused to print McKay's response, so McKay did so in Workers' Dreadnought, writing:
Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper? Rape is rape; the colour of the skin doesn't make it different. Negroes are no more over-sexed than Caucasians; mulatto children in the West Indies and America were not the result of parthenogenesis. If Negro troops had syphilis, they contracted it from the white and yellow races. As for German women, in their economic plight, they were selling themselves to anyone. I do not protest because I happen to be a Negro... I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race... who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war... Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist pacifist Daily Herald.Reindeers, Robert, "Racialism on the Left: E.D. Morel and the 'Black Horror on the Rhine'", International Review of Social History, Volume 13, 1968 (pp. 1–28), p. 17.
Since January 1920, McKay had been involved with the Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a council communist group active in the East End with a majority of women at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper. He worked closely with the Finnish people Bolshevik Erkki Veltheim. He attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden.
When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" attributed to "Leon Lopez", which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers' Dreadnought.Wayne F. Cooper (1996). 080712074X, LSU Press. 080712074X
He also wrote Banana Bottom during this 11-year span. Here McKay presented a clear depiction of his principal theme, that black individuals quest for cultural identity in a white society. His final year abroad saw the creation of Gingertown, a collection of 12 short stories. Half of these tales depict his life in Harlem and the others revolve around his time in Jamaica.
On May 22, 1948, he died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 57 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3rd edn: 2 (Kindle Location 29279). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Among his works that challenged racial discrimination is the poem "If We Must Die" (1919), a call for his people to fight with determination and courage against those who would murder them.
McKay divested himself from many aspects and growing prescriptions of modernism. By the beginning of the 20th century, the sonnet form had become an antiquated poetic style, but McKay found it an ideal medium to convey his ideas. Many modernists, however, rejected and criticized his use of the sonnet. Despite their reaction, he persevered and created a significant number of modern sonnets.
Having spent time among the artists of Paris in the 1920s, he was intimately acquainted with the dynamics between painters and models and how modernist painters presented African subjects and African culture. In her article "Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys", Leah Rosenberg writes: "The fascination with African art and its identification with female sexuality was characteristic of modernist and avant-garde primitivism". The inclination to stereotype and caricature the African physical form created, however inadvertently, a form of hegemony reminiscent to McKay of the colonialism he grew up within Jamaica. "Sexuality and black culture," Rosenberg explains, "held a privileged place in modernist and avant-garde art from Pablo Picasso to Gertrude Stein". In need of money, McKay posed nude for the Cubist painter André Lhote. Through his experience, McKay saw first-hand how the larger social hegemony between European white supremacy and people of Afro-Caribbean descent could play itself out between the artist and its subject. McKay critically recalled the experience in various ways in many of his most notable works. In doing so, he shone a critical light on a cornerstone of modernism and once again pushed back against a system in which he found himself.
McKay's sexuality is hinted at in some of his literary work. His 1929 novel Banjo: a Story without a Plot, for instance, contains a queer-coded ending. As all the other characters of the ensemble featured in this work make plans to depart, Banjo asks Ray (the two characters most central to the story) to go off separately together. In and of itself, this may not seem to indicate a romantic nature to their future relationship, but as Ray initially considers Banjo's proposal to go off together, he recalls how much joy he associated with the dream of "loafing after their labors long enough to laugh and love and jazz and fight."
Home to Harlem gained a substantial readership, especially among people who wanted to know more about the intense, sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds." In Home to Harlem, McKay looked among the common people for a black identity.
Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay's contemporaries, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demands" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness." As Du Bois said, " Home to Harlem... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath." Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African-American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people. Home to Harlem entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
McKay's other novels were Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo includes a portrayal of how the French people treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies and centers on black seamen in Marseille. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice". Banana Bottom, McKay's third novel, depicts a black individual in search of a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses the underlying racial and cultural tensions.
McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His Selected Poems (1953) represents his selection and arrangement of 1947, but he was unable to find a publisher for it and it appeared posthumously six years later. According to Amardeep Singh's website, Claude McKay's Early Poetry, it was originally published by Bookman & Associates in 1953 with an introduction by John Dewey and subsequently reprinted by Harcourt Brace with the Dewey introduction replaced by a biographical note by Max Eastman. (2025). 9780451527820, Signet. ISBN 9780451527820
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. . McKay is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his work heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright. "Mckay, Claude (1890-1948)", from St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. 2005–2006 Thomson Gale.
In 2015, a passageway in Marseille was named after McKay.Brent Hayes Edwards, "A Legless Black Man Comes Into a Windfall in This Biting Satire", The New York Times, February 11, 2020.
Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" was recited in the film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.
Professor Cloutier (now at the University of Pennsylvania) and his advisor Professor Brent Hayes Edwards successfully authenticated the manuscript, and have received permission from the McKay estate to publish the novel, a satire set in 1936, with an introduction about how it was found and its provenance verified.
It was published in February 2017.
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