Harlem Renaissance Writer Claude McKay
In 1931, American poet Langston Hughes penned the following lines that allude to a transnational dialogue in the African experience:
It is the same everywhere for me:
On the docks at Sierra Leone,
In the cotton fields of Alabama,
In the diamond mines of Kimberley,
On the coffee field of Hayti,
The banana lands of Central America,
The streets of Harlem,
And the cities of Morocco and Tripoli.[1]
Hughes’s poem “Always the Same” signifies that the poet not only carries the burden of his race, but also that of his entire generation and of all previous generations who have suffered before him.[2] Hughes is recognized as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, artistic, and social explosion that originated in the New York neighborhood that bore its name and eventually expanded into a national movement. Yet, in this poem Hughes intended to reflect a common transnational, transatlantic, and diasporic experience that he felt was shared by African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans alike.
Festus Claudius “Claude” McKay was also a literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance. While both figures belonged to the same interdisciplinary tradition of Black intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, McKay’s path differed significantly than that of Hughes in the sense that many of his works reveal his inner struggle with what has been called a “transnational literary identity” as he grappled with racism in the United States.
Born in Jamaica in 1889, McKay migrated to the United States and attended schools in Alabama and Kansas, before he settling in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1917. There he found a place amidst bohemian circles and was able to explore his poetic and literary talents. In 1919, McKay published a successful collection of poems entitled Baptism, marking that a pivotal year in the Harlem Renaissance. His revolutionary poem “If We Must Die” appears in this collection, and in it, McKay rouses his innermost emotions of living as a Black man in a white man’s world:
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…
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back![3]
Although the poem does not specifically mention race, its tone suggests defiance against the violence and bloodshed perpetuated against African Americans by white mobs during the Red Summer of 1919. While this poem is powerful on many levels, the context during which it was written is perhaps one of the most significant. The summer of 1919 marked the official end of World War I. Nearly 400,000 African Americans had served in the war. Once they returned home after having served their country—a country that forced them to live in segregation, soldiers faced mistreatment and received little or no respect their service. This poem has been cited as an inspiration to all colonized and oppressed people around the world for decades and transcends the color line.
Despite his success with two additional volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay decided to leave the country. He had become overwhelmingly disgruntled with race relations in the United States and left for the Soviet Union in 1922 to deepen his commitment to communism. Oddly enough, McKay would produce some of his most prolific works of the Harlem Renaissance while living on foreign soil.
He traveled around Europe and North Africa for over a decade before returning to the United States in 1934.
While the Harlem Renaissance was a celebration of Black life, culture, and art, it also complicated questions of race and ethnicity, especially when themes such as migration, adjustment, and interaction among the different groups who lived in the city emerged. McKay’s semi-autobiographical works often tackled these issues head-on, and it is believed that they reflect the inner conflicts with which he was grappling. Although McKay is undoubtedly one of the premier contributors of the Harlem Renaissance, many have speculated that he never “settled” after leaving his homeland of Jamaica. In his 1922 poem “The City’s Love,” McKay underscores his conflicting feelings as an outsider but also as an “alien guest”:
For one brief golden moment rare like wine,
The gracious city swept across the line;
Oblivious of the color of my skin,
Forgetting that I was an alien guest…[4]
Although he feels alienated and treated as an “outsider,” he acknowledges that he is one who has a “hostile heart,” and that it is the city that “bends to [him].” Homesickness aside, there are a few possible social and cultural contributing factors. The Great Migration (1910–1940) spurred the relocation of approximately 1.5 million African Americans from the South to cities in the North. This migration introduced a new host of social negotiation between the different groups, especially in neighborhoods like Harlem. In the early twentieth century, people from the Caribbean were unlikely to migrate with family members, but they were highly likely to settle in kin groups. This led to the creation of tightly-knit social institutions, such as the church. The church often became the center of the immigrant community and an intricate part of the evolving kin structure as newcomers negotiated their place in society alongside native Black Americans. As an individual dedicated to the communist cause, it is possible that McKay did not quite find his place because the church would have been the center of community life. And while he found intellectual kinship amongst writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, many of his pivotal works were written while he was abroad.
It was in France that he wrote his bestselling, yet provocative work, Home to Harlem (1928) which reflected the cultural and political split that was evident within the Harlem Renaissance as well as the different ideas of how the literature that embodied the Harlem Renaissance should be represented. In Home to Harlem, a fictional immigrant, Ray, comes to realize that his identity and culture had been redefined for him by his fellow native Blacks as well as by white Americans. McKay’s character Ray allows the reader to peek into the world of a “lower-class migratory community.” He used this character to explore the diversity of Black identity, the totality of Black identity, and how it shifted and evolved across and within different geographical regions.
Although intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois praised parts of the novel and recognized that “there are bits of “Home to Harlem,” [which are] beautiful and fascinating,” he publicly criticized McKay for his depiction of Blacks in Home to Harlem as “licentious” and argued that the work fed into the demands of white readers and publishers. Du Bois’s harsh criticisms of McKay’s Home to Harlem were not surprising (or depending on one’s views, unfounded). This is one case that reveals the cultural split in the movement; Home to Harlem was modeled on Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel with an (intentionally) offensive title. Van Vechten was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and lifelong friend of Langton Hughes. However, he was also considered a highly controversial figure, especially by Du Bois, so it is not surprising that Du Bois would publicly chastise an author who produced a work that mirrored in any way one that resembled Van Vechten’s 1926 novel.
In addition to describing the loss of his homeland, McKay critiqued racism and the treatment of colonized people. His long-term disenchantment with race relations and politics in American society is revealed in the 1937 autobiographical account, A Long Way from Home in which he takes on the role of “black sojourner” and describes his often-strained relationship with the Black scholars of the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps McKay found his place toward the end of his life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940 and would later convert to Catholicism. In 1948, he died in relative obscurity, without having published a renowned work for several years. Still, this Black literary genius lives on through his literature of the African diaspora and in the ways in which he continues to inspire generations of readers and writers.
Image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1934).
McKay, Claude. Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953).
[1] Nancy Cunard, ed. Negro Anthology (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1934).
[2] Cunard, iv.
[3] Claude McKay, Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953): 36.
[4] McKay, 66.
Holly is a published writer and editor from Philly. I’m a mom to two amazing kids, aged 13 and 3. I have a Ph.D. in Latin American history. As a first-generation American, I’ve always been interested in learning more about diasporic communities, including the African Diaspora. My passion for social justice and human rights is what inspired me to volunteer, as I believe all children should take pride in their cultural heritage.
