Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay (September 15,
1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer and poet as well as a seminal figure
in the Harlem Renaissance.
He wrote five novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a
best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana
Bottom (1933), Romance in Marseille (published in 2020), and in 1941 a
manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between
the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem which remained unpublished
until 2017.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection
of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way
from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in
1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (1940).
His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the
first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was
published posthumously, in 1953.
McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but
he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist
Party USA. However, some scholars dispute that claim, noting his close ties to
active members, his attendance at communist-led events, and his months-long
stay in the Soviet Union in 1922–23, which he wrote about very favorably.
He gradually became disillusioned with communism,
however, and by the mid-1930s had begun to write negatively about it. By the
late 1930s his anti-Stalinism isolated him from other Harlem intellectuals, and
by 1942 he converted to Catholicism and left Harlem, and he worked for a
Catholic organization until his death.
If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY
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 accursèd lot.
If we must die, O
let us nobly die,
So that our
precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even
the monsters we defy
Shall be
constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must
meet the common foe!
Though far
outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their
thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before
us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll
face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the
wall, dying, but fighting back!