Claude McKay

Claude McKay (1889-1948). Photo by James Lane Allen (1907-1977). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Festus Claudius McKay (September 15, 1889 - May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American poet who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Life

Youth

McKay was born in Nairne Castle near James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica. He was the youngest child of Hannah Ann Elizabeth (Edwards) and Thomas Francis McKay, well-to-do peasant farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. Thomas McKay's father was of Ashanti descent, and Claude recounted that his father would share stories of Ashanti customs with him. Claude's mother was of Malagasy ancestry.

At 4 years old, McKay started basic school at the church he attended. At age 7, he was sent to live with his oldest brother, a school teacher, to be given the best education available. While living with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science and theology. He started writing poetry at the age of 10.

In 1906, McKay became an apprentice to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenga. He stayed in his apprenticeship for about 2 years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met a man named Walter Jekyll who became a mentor and an inspiration for him. He encouraged McKay to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect and even later set some of McKay's verses to music.

Jekyll helped McKay publish his debut collection of poetry, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the earliest poems published in Jamaican patois (a dialect of mainly English words and African structure). McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads, came out in the same year and was based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica.

Career in U.S.

Claude McKay, from Spring in New Hampshire and other poems, 1920. Courtesy Internet Archive.

McKay left for the U.S. in 1912 to attend Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, but did not become an American citizen until 1940. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina which inspired him to write more poetry,where many public facilities were segregated. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machinelike existence there" and quickly left to study at Kansas State University.

At Kansas State, he read W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.

McKay published 2 poems in 1917 in Seven Arts under the pen name "Eli Edwards" while working as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922). It was here that he published his famous poem, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer.

During McKay's time with The Liberator, he may have had affairs with men, including Waldo Frank and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Later in Paris he may have had a sexual relationship with Canadian writer John Glassco, but details on any of this are few.

McKay 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 Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the 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. McKay soon left for London, England.

McKay in London

Claude McKay and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1922. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

McKay arrived in London in autumn 1919. He used to frequent a soldier's club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association. It was during this period that McKay's commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for the Workers' Dreadnought.

In 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E.D. Morel. Entitled "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine", it insinuated gross hypersexuality on black people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay's response. This response then appeared in Workers' Dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End of London, which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the earliest black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference which 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 amongst 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 an article cited by the government in its case against the Workers' Dreadnought.

From November 1922 to June 1923, McKay visited the Soviet Union and attended the 4th congress of the Communist International in Moscow. There, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. He wrote the manuscripts for a book of essays called Negroes in America and 3 stories published as Lynching in America, both of which originally appeared in Russian and were re-translated into English. McKay's original English manuscripts have been lost.

Harlem Renaissance

McKay was a substantial figure who emerged as a militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. He was regarded as a major poet of the movement. Some of his most famous poems during that period were the militant "If We Must Die" (1919) and his self portrait "Outcast," which was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922).

McKay also wrote lyrics reminiscent of his Jamaican homeland and works about love and exile, such as the Tropics in New York and Harlem Dancer. The tone for many of his works have been described as race-conscious and revolutionary. He was an advocate for full civil liberties and racial solidarity. McKay's pride in his culture and racial awareness helped stimulate expression in African American literacy.

In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. Despite this, the book drew fire from 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 demand[s]" 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.

McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and 2 autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His Selected Poems (1953), and his second autobiography, My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979), were published posthumously.

Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted in 1944. He died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 59.

Writing

Novels

McKay's novel Home to Harlem (1928), which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. The book gained a substantial readership, especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense, and sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds." Home to Harlem was a work in which McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity.

McKay's other novels were Banjo (1930) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated black colonists, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Cesaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice". Banana Bottom was McKay's 3rd novel. The book is said to follow a principal theme of a black individual in search of establishing a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses underlying racial and cultural tensions.

Recognition

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. He is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his works heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

Awards

• Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, gold medal, 1912, for Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads;
• Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem;
• James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937.

Publications

Poetry

• Songs of Jamaica (with introduction by Walter Gardner). Kingston, Jamaica: Gardner, 1912; Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969.
• Constab Ballads. London: Watts, 1912.
• Spring in New Hampshire, and other poems. London: Grant Richards, 1920.
• Harlem Shadows: The poems of Claude McKay (with introduction by Max Eastman). New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
• Selected Poems (with introduction by John Dewey, biographical note by Max Eastman). New York: Bookman, 1953.
• The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay (edited by Wayne F. Cooper). (2 volumes), Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972; (1 volume), Salem, NH: Ayers, 1987.
• The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected poetry and prose, 1912-1948 (edited by Wayne F. Cooper). New York: Schocken, 1973.
• Selected Poems (edited with an introduction by Joan R. Sherman). Mineloa, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.
• Complete Poems (edited by William J. Maxwell). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Novels

• Home to Harlem. New York: Harper, 1928; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007.
• Banjo: A story without a plot. New York: Harper, 1929.
• Banana Bottom. New York: Harper, 1933.

Short fiction

• Gingertown (short stories). New York: Harper, 1932.
• My Green Hills of Jamaica, and five Jamaican short stories (edited by Mervyn Morris). Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1975.

Non-fiction

• A Long Way from Home (autobiography). New York: Furman, 1937
  • (edited by Gene Andrew Jarnett). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
• Harlem: Negro metropolis. New York: Dutton, 1940.
• Harlem Glory: A fragment of Aframerican life. Chicago: Kerr, 1990.
• Romance in Marseilles (edited by Rich Bradbury). Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1995.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

Claude McKay reads aloud his poems

• List of Caribbean poets
• Harlem Renaissance poets
• List of U.S. poets

References

• Long, Richard A., Afro-American Writing: An anthology of prose and poetry. Penn State Press, 1985.

External Links

Poems

• To the White Fiends"
• 7 poems by McKay: "America," "America," "The Easter Flower," "Winter in the Country," "A Memory of June," "The Snow-Fairy", "To Winter", "After the Winter"
• Claude McKay at The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog: profile & 5 poems
• McKay, Claude (1889-1948) - 8 poems (America, December 1919, Enslaved, Harlem Shadows, If We Must Die, On Broadway, Romance, The Tropics in New York) at Representative Poetry Online
• Claude McKay profile and 10 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Claude McKay 1889-1948 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Claude McKay at PoemHunter (80 poems)
• Claude McKay at AllPoetry (81 poems)
• Additional Poems by Claude McKay

Books

• Works by Claude McKay at the Internet Archive
• Claude McKay at Amazon.com

About

• Claude McKay at Biography.com
• Rebecca Tortello, "Claude McKay: Jamaica's Poet Laureate 1890 - 1948, Jamaica Gleaner
• Claude McKay (1889-1948) at Modern American Poetry