2 2 In the years following the end of World War I, a rising tide of white racism swept across the United States. Several million whites joined the Ku Klux Klan. White mobs began to attack black communities, destroying homes, schools, and churches. Scores of African Americans were lynched, some of them while still wearing their U.S. army uniforms. Jamaican-born radical Claude McKay (1889–1948) was outraged by these racial atrocities, and expressed his militancy in poetry and essays.
“If We Must Die”
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.
If we must die—oh, 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!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
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!
Source: “If We Must Die,” Liberator 2 (July 1919), p. 21. Reprinted from Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), p. 36.
Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
Addison Gayle, Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972).
Josh Gosciak, The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
Winston James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (London: Verso, 2001).
Claude McKay, Complete Poems, ed. by William J. Maxwell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Kotti Sree Ramesh and K. Nirupa Rani, Claude McKay: The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006).
Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).