Who was Claude McKay?

If We must Die is, perhaps, Claude McKay’s most famous poem. It was penned at a time when the United States (US) was rocked by rampant racial violence, and its messages of defiance and of dying with dignity resonated with scholars and the literati the world over. It is in the content of college literature courses, and it is much-analysed in literary journals and elsewhere.

However, many Jamaicans do not know about the impact Festus Claudius McKay, who was born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, Jamaica, on September 15, 1889, made on the world of literature and how the youngest of 11 children for farmers Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards acquired his international repute way beyond If We Must Die.

It was a bumpy journey, home and abroad, with twists and turns that inspired some of his works. He had the luxury of a teacher for an older brother, Uriah Theodore McKay, with whom he was sent to live when he was seven. Uriah had a library of English novels, poetry collections, and science books, and Festus voraciously read literature, philosophy, religion, and science books.

The clergyman, planter, and translator Walter Jekyll was also a mentor, who encouraged him to write verses in Jamaican Creole. Yet, writing books and poems was not something Claude McKay set out to do on the cusp of adulthood.

He moved to Brown’s Town in St Ann when he was 17 and found work as a carpenter’s apprentice. Kingston was another stop on his young journey, but it was a place where racism was planted in every nook and cranny. So it was back to the sun at Sunny Ville, where the beauty of the environment was not lost on his creative mind.

In 1912, when McKay was 23, he published his first book of verse, Songs of Jamaica, in Kingston, with the help of Jekyll. In it, he reflected in Jamaican dialect on being black in Jamaica. It earned him a grant from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, which honoured him with the Musgrave Medal in 1912 for his volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Research could not determine whether he went to study on that grant, but he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, in late summer 1912.

New York state of mind

McKay then enrolled at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He sojourned at Tuskegee for only a few months, for the place was rife with racism, before leaving to study agriculture at Kansas State College, which he attended from 1912 to 1914. He did not stay to graduate, for he was in a New York state of mind. In New York City, he worked odd jobs while trying to publish his work in literary journals.

McKay was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the 1920s when there was a cultural movement promoting and celebrating African-American art and literature. His works helped to shape the movement and inspire other writers and artists. In his poems he often explored the concept of blackness and celebrated black identity. In 1917, he published two sonnets: The Harlem Dancer and Invocation. He published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. Harlem Shadows was written in 1922. Several poetry collections were published posthumously. He also published numerous books, including My Green Hills, a short story collection, and the award-winning Home to Harlem, his first novel.

That book, depicting the lives of African-Americans in New York City, made him the first African-American to write a best-selling novel in the US.

He was the recipient of the prestigious Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement in 1929 for the said book and Harlem Shadows.

Other books to his credit are the 1929 novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot; a collection of short stories titled Gingertown, in 1932; the novel Banana Bottom, in 1933. His autobiography, A Long Way from Home, was published in 1937, and a non-fiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, in 1940.

Long after his death from a heart attack in Chicago, Illinois, on May 22, 1948, McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (2017), and Romance in Marseille (2020) were also published. He was married to Eulalie Lewars, with whom he had a daughter, Hope.

In addition to his literary achievements, McKay was also a political activist, advocating for civil rights and social justice and using his writing to raise awareness of racial inequality. He developed an interest in communism and social justice and aligned himself with Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association.

From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, McKay travelled to the Soviet Union and then throughout Europe and North Africa and got acquainted with Leon Trotsky. In 1934, being disappointed with elements of communism, he moved back to Harlem. In ill-health, obscurity, and facing financial challenges, McKay spent his last years in Chicago, perhaps not knowing the major impact he had had on African-Jamaican-American literature.

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