Claude McKay
|
|
Mckay_a.jpg
Claude McKay (September 15, 1889 - May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer, humanist and communist. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical book, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously.
Born in Sunnyville, Clarendon, Jamaica, he was the youngest son in a large family. His father, Thomas McKay was a peasant, but had enough property to qualify to vote. Claude came to the attention of Walter Jekyll who helped him publish his first book of poems. Songs of Jamaica in 1912. These were the first poems published in patois.
McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads came out the same year and were based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica. He also left for the USA that year going to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in Charleston, South Carolina. Many public facilities were not available to Black people. Disliking the "semi-military, machinelike existence there", Claude quickly left to study at Kansas State University. His political involvement dates from these days. He also read W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk which had a major impact on McKay.
Despite doing well in exams, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and went to New York where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars. However she was to weary of life in New York and returned to Jamaica in six months.
It was several years before McKay had two poems published in 1917 in Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. However McKay continued to work as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman who produced The Liberator. It was here that Claude published one of his most famous poems If We Must Die during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against Black people in Anglo-American societies. This was amongst a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer.
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 the African Caribbeans 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 organisation, the African Blood Brotherhood. However McKay soon left for London, England.
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 used to frequent a soldier's club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shorditch. It was during this period that McKay's commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club McKay met 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 African people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay's response to this racist slur. This response then appeared in Workers' dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers' dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Fedration, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organisation. He became a paid journalist by the papper, some people claim he was the first 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 Defense 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 one of the articles cited by the government in its case against the Workers' Dreadnought.
See also
External links
- "If We Must Die" (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mckay.html)
- A selection of McKay's works from the English Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm)