McKay, Claude

By: James Smethurst

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

McKay, Claude

1889–1948
Jamaican-born American poet, essayist, and novelist who was one of the founders of both modern African American literature and modern Jamaican literature.

Claude McKay's work as a poet, novelist, and essayist heralded several of the most significant moments in African American culture. His protest poetry of the late 1910s and the early 1920s was seen by many of his contemporaries as the premier example of the New Negro spirit. His novels were sophisticated considerations of the problems and possibilities of Pan-Africanism at the end of the colonial era, influencing writers of African descent throughout the world. His early poetry in Jamaican patois and his fiction set in Jamaica are now seen as crucial to the development of a national Jamaican literature.

McKay's parents, Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann McKay, were prosperous farmers by the standards of Sunny Ville, Jamaica, the town where McKay was born. Through the efforts of his brother Uriah Theodore, a schoolteacher, and of Walter Jekyll, an expatriate Englishman who became McKay's patron and who was particularly important in encouraging McKay's literary ambitions, McKay received more formal education than was typical for a child of a farming family. He became a police constable (or “constab”) in Kingston in 1911.

McKay published two collections of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, in 1912. These poems emerged largely out of McKay's experience as a constab, which he found alienating, along with urban life in general. He felt uncomfortably located between the Jamaican elite and the great mass of the urban poor. Many of the concerns of McKay's later work, such as the opposition of the city and the country, the problems of exile, and the relation of the black intellectual to the common folk, first appear in these poems.

McKay moved to the United States in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. After brief stints at Tuskegee and Kansas State University, McKay left for Harlem, New York. In Harlem he wrote poetry while holding several menial jobs, including working on a railroad dining car. This period of McKay's work is best remembered for his militant protest sonnets, notably “If We Must Die,” considered by his contemporaries, such as James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, to be the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote many poems of exile, such as “Flame-Heart” and “The Tropics in New York,” in which he nostalgically invokes a tropical landscape and the desire to return to a remembered community. Even many of the protest sonnets can be considered exile poems because a break between the poem's speaker and his original community is often at the root of the speaker's anger. Much of McKay's early poetry was collected in the book Harlem Shadows (1922).

In 1919 McKay moved to Europe, where he became increasingly involved in the new Communist movement. McKay saw in communism an alternative to racism, poverty, and colonialism. He worked on Sylvia Pankhurst's pro-Communist newspaper Worker's Dreadnought in London. Upon his return to New York in 1921, he became coeditor (with Mike Gold) of the radical journal the Liberator. After personal and aesthetic disagreements with Gold and other members of the Liberator editorial board, McKay left the journal in 1922. As a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1922, McKay declared that the Negro Question was central to the world revolutionary movement. He moved again to Europe in 1923 and remained in Europe and North Africa until 1934.

In his two novels of the 1920s, Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), McKay investigated how the concepts of race and class worked in a world dominated by capitalism and colonialism and how cosmopolitan and rural black communities can be reconciled to each other. Home to Harlem was more commercially successful than any novel by an African American author to that point. Its plot revolves around an intellectual Haitian expatriate, Ray, and an African American longshoreman and World War I veteran, Jake. Ray worries constantly and feels isolated from the African American community because of his European education. Jake is spontaneous and direct. Ray and Jake work for a time as dining car workers, becoming close friends. Ray appears again in Banjo with another “natural” black character, the African American musician Lincoln Agrippa Daily (or “Banjo”). Banjo is set in the old port of Marseilles and features a shifting group of black longshoremen, sailors, and drifters from Africa. In both novels McKay articulates the need for the exiled black intellectual to return to the common black folk. This theme is taken even further in McKay's final novel, Banana Bottom (1933). The protagonist of Banana Bottom is Bita Plant, a European-educated Jamaican woman who returns to her native village in Jamaica. In the course of the novel, Plant rejects European culture and the Jamaican elite, choosing instead to rejoin the farming folk.

McKay returned to the United States in 1934. During the 1920s and early 1930s McKay moved away from the Communist movement, becoming at last an active anticommunist. McKay's final books, the autobiographical A Long Way from Home (1937) and the sociological Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), were in large part attacks on the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). McKay also sharply criticized black intellectuals for either being intimidated or deceived by the CPUSA in the late 1930s and early 1940s. While working as a member of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project in New York during the late 1930s, McKay attempted without success to organize an anticommunist writer's group in Harlem. Throughout this work McKay became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of black artists and intellectuals.

McKay's interest in Roman Catholicism grew significantly during the 1940s, and he officially joined the Catholic Church in 1944. At this time he wrote much new poetry, which he failed to get published, a failure he blamed on the influence of the CPUSA.

See also Communist Party and African Americans.

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