McKay, Claude

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McKay, Claude

September 15, 1889
May 22, 1948

The poet and novelist Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay was the child of independent small farmers. In 1912 he published two volumes of Jamaican dialect poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. They reflect the British imperial influences of his youth and reveal that the rebellion that characterized McKay's American poetry lay in both his Jamaican experience and his later experience of white racism in the United States. His Jamaican poetry also contains early versions of his pastoral longing for childhood innocence and his primal faith in the self-sufficiency and enduring virtues of the rural black community of his childhood and youth.

McKay left Jamaica in 1912 to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, but in 1914 he moved to New York City, where he began again to write poetry. In 1919, he became a regular contributor to the revolutionary literary monthly the Liberator, and he achieved fame among black Americans for his sonnet "If We Must Die," which exhorted African Americans to fight bravely against the violence directed against them in the reactionary aftermath of World War I. Although expressed in traditional sonnet form, McKay's post–World War I poetry heralded modern black expressions of anger, alienation, and rebellion, and he quickly became a disturbing, seminal voice in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. His collected American poetry includes Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922).

The years between 1919 and 1922 marked the height of McKay's political radicalism. In 1922 he journeyed to Moscow, where he attended the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, but his independence and his criticisms of American and British Communists led to his abandonment of communism. In the 1930s he became a vocal critic of international communism because of its antidemocratic dominance by the Soviet Union.

From 1923 until 1934, McKay lived in western Europe and Tangiers. While abroad, he published three novels—Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933)—plus one collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932). In his novels, McKay rebelled against the genteel traditions of older black writers, and he offended leaders of black protest by writing, in Home to Harlem and Banjo, of essentially leaderless rural black migrants and their predicaments in the modern, mechanistic, urban West. Both are picaresque novels that celebrate the natural resilience and ingenuity of "primitive" black heroes. To McKay's critics, his characters were irresponsible degenerates, not exemplary models of racial wisdom, and he was accused of pandering to the worst white stereotypes of African Americans.

In Gingertown and Banana Bottom, McKay retreated to the Jamaica of his childhood to recapture a lost pastoral world of blacks governed by their own rural community values. Although critics still debate the merits of McKay's fiction, it provided encouragement to younger black writers. Banjo, in particular, by stressing that blacks should build upon their own cultural values, influenced the founding generation of the Francophone Négritude movement.

In 1934, the Great Depression forced McKay back to the United States, and for the rest of his life he wrote primarily as a journalist critical of international communism, middle-class black integrationism, and white American racial and political hypocrisy. In his essays he continued to champion working-class African Americans, whom he believed understood better than their leaders the necessity of community development. He published a memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), and a collection of essays, Harlem, Negro Metropolis (1940), based largely on materials about Harlem folk life he collected as a member of New York City's Federal Writers Project. In 1944—ill, broke, and intellectually isolated—he joined the Roman Catholic Church, and he spent the last years of his life in Chicago working for the Catholic Youth Organization.

Although he is best known as a poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay's social criticism in the 1930s and 1940s was not negligible, though it was controversial, and it has since remained hard to grasp because he was neither a black nationalist, an internationalist, nor a traditional integrationist. He instead believed deeply that blacks, in their various American ethnicities, had much to contribute as ethnic groups and as a race to the collective American life, and that in the future a recognition, acceptance, and celebration of differences between peoples—and not simply individual integration—would best strengthen and bring together the American populace.