WCould Conservative British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the progressive Black Lives Matter movement have something in common? Not much, is the obvious answer – except that both, under very different circumstances, quoted lines from the same poem to inspire in their listeners a mood of heroic defiance.
Churchill was calling for US support in the face of Nazi aggression in the 1940s and BLM protesting the scourge of racial violence following the death of George Floyd. Yet both returned to the words written in 1919 in a rousing call to arms entitled “If We Must Die”:
O relative! we must meet the common enemy!
Though outnumbered, let us be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal a deadly blow!
The poem was written in the most terrible context. The so-called Red Summer following the end of World War I witnessed a wave of murders, lynchings and riots across the United States, as mass migration from southern states and economic hardship fueled resentment and racist violence against black communities. Hundreds died and many other homes and businesses were attacked by white mobs. African Americans often had no choice but to defend themselves, as the poet suggests they must:
Like men, we shall face the murderous, cowardly herd,
Pressed against the wall, dying, but fighting!
The events of 1919 were an American tragedy, but the poem was written by a Jamaican – arguably one of the island’s greatest writers. It was part of his collection of poems, Shadows of Harlem, published a century ago in New York—a collection now considered a landmark in black literature. His name was Claude McKay and his life, as well as his work, was nothing short of remarkable.
A new political biography, Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevikby Jamaican-born academic Winston James, reveals in fascinating detail the story of the militant poet who came from an unusually prosperous black farming family in Clarendon Parish, but who would go on to meet Trotsky and embrace the cause of the Russian Revolution.
Born in 1890, he was writing poetry by the age of 10, was a cabinet apprentice and served as a policeman before moving to the US in 1912 to study agriculture. The racism he encountered in South Carolina led him to New York, where he worked in a restaurant, as a hotel porter, and as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
It was not the poet’s ivory tower. He saw poverty and discrimination firsthand and it shaped his politics and poetry. He had been a moderate reform socialist in Jamaica, but the US and the racism found there turned him into a revolutionary.
McKay, Winston James tells us, had an insatiable desire to “wander and wonder.” He managed in 1919 to go to London, where he mixed with the radical figures of the time such as Sylvia Pankhurst; contributed to its pro-communist newspaper; and frequented activist clubs where revolution and Bolshevism were discussed.
He was perhaps a novelty as a black from colonial Jamaica. And if he made friends and gained respect in leftist circles, he also faced prejudice and hatred. Disillusioned with the “motherland” he had grown to revere in the Caribbean, he returned to the US in 1921, writing that he would rather fight “the fierce brutal hatred of America than the cold-grave enmity of the English.”
Shadows of Harlem, published in November 1922, brings together poems that were shaped by McKay’s volatile and politically charged life. It also heralds the arrival of a particularly important cultural phenomenon, the Harlem Renaissance. That Upper Manhattan neighborhood where McKay lived gave its name to an intensely productive outpouring of literature, art, and music emanating from the black community that had taken root there since the 1910s.
The neighborhood was famous for its jazz venues, nightclubs and forbidden pleasures – but it was also home to writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Louis Armstrong, actor Paul Robeson and the legendary Josephine Baker. The Renaissance was a multifaceted expression of black identity, a celebration of African heritage, and also a declaration that African American creativity—after slavery and segregation—was a central part of the country’s life.
McKay’s poetry captures the vitality of 1920s Harlem—its artistic vigor, but also the harsh realities of exploitation that existed in this rapidly expanding part of the metropolis. The title poem, for example, is a poignant lament for black sex workers (“the dark, half-clothed girls with weary legs . . . slipped, thinly clad, from street to street”) who lived on the fringes of a Mecca of the night.
He saw the city as a place of wonder, but also as a place of suffering and pain for the dispossessed—perceptions that fueled his indignation and radicalism. He also understood the emptiness and alienation of modern urban life. In “Broadway,” he writes: As in a dream I stand and watch / Broadway, shining Broadway – alone / My heart, my heart is lonely.
There is a recurring nostalgia for the land of his birth, a remembered idyll that contrasts with the chilling modernity of New York. He sees himself as an expatriate, who does not belong to the USA, but neither does he want to abandon his mission and political commitment. His poetry recalls the flora and fauna of Jamaica, scenes from his childhood, his late mother, the tight-knit community of Clarendon Hills.
In “Tropics in New York,” the poet observes a display of tropical fruit in a store window and is moved to tears by memories of a lost past: A wave of longing ran through my body, / And hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside, bowed my head and wept.
McKay would never return to Jamaica, although much later he would reminisce about his youth My Green Hills of Jamaica, written in 1946 two years before his death. Instead, his concern took him to revolutionary Russia on “a magical pilgrimage,” to Western Europe and North Africa. In later years he renounced communism, denounced Stalin, and eventually embraced Catholicism—a dramatic reversal of his earlier atheism.
Navigating the most turbulent years of the 20th century, McKay’s life is a fascinating story of passionately held political beliefs and bohemian adventures. Perhaps paradoxically, this revolutionary was most comfortable in his poetry with the traditional sonnet form. As a young man he read Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it was in this conventional structure – dating from the 13th century – that he wrote many of his poems and the anthem of resistance that continues to resonate a century later.
