The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance

and Claude McKay

- Introduction
- McKay's Life & Influence
- Analysis of "If We Must Die"
- Works Cited

Whites in America had suppressed African culture since the first shipment of slaves from Africa had reached the North American East Coast in 1619. African Americans were left uneducated and forbidden to learn reading and writing skills. Blacks had their culture stripped from beneath them more and more with every new generation. Their only way to cling to African culture was through song during fieldwork. It was not until after the Civil War that blacks had the limited opportunity to be educated and gradually assimilate into white American society. Immediately following World War I, a Negro population newly transplanted from the rural and bloody South sank its roots into the promises offered by Northern Industrial cities (Academy1). The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and 30's was the first true outlet for African American talent, expression, and culture. Black artists, writers, and musicians had to first attract a white audience by copying white works. Soon after blacks gained recognition they created their own distinct African cultural movement in Harlem. Literature played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance by proving to whites of blacks' sophisticated talents. These writers searched for a unifying cultural identity and boldly proclaimed the advent of a new cultural aesthetic, a rebirth of ethnic pride on new soil (Art1). Poetry and other writing expressed the black struggle in America since the time of slavery. The passion and vividness in which authors and poets wrote earned them respect and attention from white crowds that had ignored them before. Claude McKay was a black writer who captured the black experience, culture and emergence of blacks from white society. "If this Renaissance is going to be more than a sporadic scabby thing, we'll have to get down to our racial roots to credit it…native roots and building up from out people is…culture" (Bon132). Claude McKay was born in Jamaica from a "maroon" background. Maroons were slaves that had escaped plantations and sought refuge in the mountains. McKay grew up with a British-oriented school education and studied at Tuskegee and Kansas State University in the United States (Bon35). McKay used this principle of equality in most of his writings. When in 1912 McKay left Jamaica, at the age of 22, he brought with him the political ideal of "universal peasantry" the practice of equality among all people, to the United States. The primitivism in both works: Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, which emphasized peasant life with the use of native dialect, were attractive to a white audience that searched for change and excitement in the 20's and 30's (Bon 128-9). In 1922 Harcourt, Brace and Company published McKay's Harlem Shadows, the first time in ten years that a major United States' publisher put out a collection of poems by a black man (Bon7). McKay captured the attention of whites yearning for primitive works and blacks who sought a separate black culture.

The Harlem Renaissance, for blacks, was a racial uplifting (Bon 48). McKay's influence included his concern with motivating other blacks to practice their individual culture. Even though McKay wanted acceptance in America, he yearned to be able to separate and develop his own culture. McKay's novel, Home to Harlem written in 1928, depicted his need to flee "for his life": either to flee from white society or to develop a black separate entity, but within Anglo-Saxon America (Cooke111). Another predominant theme found in McKay's 1919 sonnet "If We Must Die" is black empowerment. This work bent the social tradition that blacks should succumb to white force and it encouraged blacks to react to violence with violence (Bon37). Also McKay wrote to stress black equality. McKay explained: "This isn't right what's happening, and we deserve redress" (Giovanni34). Many of his poems were full of the wrath Negroes felt towards whites because of injustices, while others optimistically glorified the beauty of black people (Bon65).

In 1919 there was a wave of race riots actuated mainly by white assaults on black neighborhoods in a dozen American cities. Claude McKay responded with his sonnet, "If We Must Die". This poem encompasses all McKay's feelings towards blacks in America. This poem could be connected back to when slaves were chained and hunted; and when they ran away from their masters. It also could symbolize the chaining of expression and identity of the black man in post-Civil War. The first theme is that blacks are belittled and treated poorly by whites, second that they must develop a separate culture, and lastly that the black man should fight back. McKay's word choices express these themes. The white men "mock" and treat the Negroes like "hogs". The inability to escape is described when the black men are "Hunted" and "penned". But the black man will drive forward against the whites: "dying, but fighting back!". McKay's vivid imagery clearly depicts the conflict of black and white. The white men are picture as a "murderous, cowardly pack" almost seen as dogs or wolves after prey. A black man can be pictured "outnumbered", "Pressed to the wall", and "before an empty grave"(New Negroe1). The black race in America seemed beaten and out, because of the white man's restraints, but the newly gained freedom, education and perseverance achieved in the 1920'3 and 30's jumpstarted paving the road for black equality and success for the future.

Thirteen More Poems By Claude McKay: More Poems

Works Cited
Art and Culture Movement: Harlem Renaissance Literature 19 Jan. 2003
HyperLink

Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1972.

Cooke, Michael. Afro-American Literature in the
Twentieth Century. London: Yale University Press, 1984.

Giovanni, Nikki. Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister
Kate. New York: Henry Holt And Company, Inc., 1996.

New Negro, Old Left (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999). 18 Jan. 2003 HyperLink

The Academy of American Poets, Poets of the Harlem
Renaissance and After. 18 Jan. 2003 HyperLink
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