Claude McKay
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay 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, a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo, Banana Bottom, Harlem Glory, Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, and a novella, Romance in Marseille.
Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown ; two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica ; and Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 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Complete Poems includes almost ninety pages of poetry written between 1923 and the late 1940s, most of it previously unpublished, a crucial addition to his poetic oeuvre.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 — the only American left-labor organization of the era that was totally open to Negro members, 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, a critical examination of American black-white racism from a Marxist class-conflict perspective, and Trial By Lynching ; 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 Catholicism and died in 1948.
Biography
Early life in Jamaica
Festus Claudius McKay, known as Claude McKay, was born September 15, 1890, in Nairne Castle near James Hill in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. He referred to his home village as Sunny Ville, a name given to the area by locals. He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. He had seven siblings. McKay's parents were active and well-respected members of the Baptist faith. Thomas was a strict, religious man who struggled to develop close relationships with his children due to his serious nature. In contrast, Hannah had a warmth that allowed her to give love freely to all of her children. Thomas was of Ashanti descent, while Hannah traced her ancestry to Madagascar. Claude recounted that his father would often share stories of Ashanti customs with the family.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 structure. McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads, was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911.
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".
First stay in the U.S.
McKay left for the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute. He was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated; this inspired him to write more poetry. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machine-like existence" and quickly left to study at Kansas State Agricultural College. At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. Despite his superior academic performance, in 1914, he decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Imelda Lewars. However, after only six months of marriage, his wife returned to Jamaica, where their daughter Ruth was born. McKay would never meet his daughter. As detailed in the Chronology of Gene Andrew Jarrett's 2007 edition of A Long Way From Home, during this period McKay first managed a Brooklyn restaurant, which failed, next worked as a waiter at a hotel in Hanover, New Hampshire, then at a Manhattan women's club, and longest and most happily as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.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 and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator magazine, where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922. 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. He also became involved with a group of black radicals 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 socialist 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 which especially targeted the IWW.