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Jason Reynolds was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland. He wasn鈥檛 into reading or writing as a boy, but that changed when he discovered his love for the lyrics and flow of Hip Hop.
Claude McKay Poet, Novelist
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Born
September 15, 1890
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Died
May 22, 1948
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Country
United States of America
Claude McKay moved from his native Jamaica to the United States to study agriculture, but instead, cultivated a passion for poetry.
Two collections of his poems came out in just two years: Songs of Jamaica appeared in 1911, followed by Constab Ballads in 1912.
Upon moving to New York in 1917, McKay fell in with a circle of politically active artists. In 1920, he began attending meetings for socialist Max Eastman’s avant-garde magazine, The Liberator. A year later, he was the publication’s coeditor.
McKay’s fiction was praised by some critics and panned by others. His novel Home to Harlem (1928), for example, told the story of a Black soldier’s homecoming after World War I. Although it depicted the underside of Harlem life, the book was embraced by the public and became the first novel by a Black writer to hit the best-seller lists. W. E. B. Du Bois and other standard bearers of the Talented Tenth, however, vilified its seamy portrayal of the Black urban existence.
Widespread lynchings of African Americans in the 1920s moved McKay to pen a series of political poems. His “If We Must Die” riveted the Black community, but scholar Alain Locke considered the poem too inflammatory to include in his New Negro anthology.
McKay eventually became disillusioned with Harlem’s literary and political scene. His early work had been strongly shaped by the ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois, yet McKay was disappointed by the man’s cold demeanor when he met him in person. He was also frustrated by Black editors, who he believed toned down his more incendiary poems and altered too many lines.
Angered and fed up with segregation—and unable to secure a guarantee that The Liberator would publish a minimum amount of work by Black writers—McKay decamped for the Soviet Union in 1922. He returned to Harlem in 1934 and published two works based on his life and career.
 I n t e r s e c t i o n s |
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Aaron Douglas illustrated the cover of McKay’s Home to Harlem. |
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Langston Hughes praised Home to Harlem. |
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James W. Johnson threw a party to raise money for McKay’s trip to the Soviet Union. |
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His work appeared in W. E. B. Du Bois’ Crisis. |
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Charlotte Mason provided him with financial support. |
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He lived briefly at YMCA’s Harlem branch. |
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鈥淚f We Must Die鈥 by Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Listen: “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay
Courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
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