America

McKay first came to America in 1912, arriving in South Carolina and then traveling to Alabama, where he briefly studied at the Tuskegee Institute before moving to attend Kansas State College. Although he had encountered racism in Jamaica, he soon realized with shock that racism was far more deeply ingrained in the fabric of American life. Throughout the South, he encountered segregated public facilities, including restaurants and water fountains, and he realized American society’s entrenched white supremacy. Public facilities for Black people, if provided, were inferior. This systemic racial prejudice made a deep impression on him. In a 1918 essay, “A Negro Poet Writes,” published in Pearson’s Magazine, McKay wrote,

I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter. […] At first I was horrified, my spirit revolted against the ignoble cruelty and blindness of it all. Then I soon found myself hating in return but this feeling couldn’t last for to hate is to be miserable (Wayne F. Cooper. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Louisiana State University Press, 1987, p. 65).

This sentiment resembles that of “America,” written just a few years later.

As a poet, McKay favored traditional verse forms, and he published 18 sonnets over an eight-year period beginning in 1917. A number of these, including “America,” dealt with anti-Black racism. In some of them, McKay expressed a more militant attitude to confronting racial oppression than he did in “America.” As his biographer writes, “In his poems he did not merely condemn racial injustices; he renounced the entire social, economic, and political order that had allowed these injustices to occur” (Cooper, 101). McKay also urged Black people to resist with violence if necessary. In his fiery 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,” which was published in the socialist literary magazine The Liberator, he referred to the oppressors as murderous “monsters” (Line 7) who must be confronted, even if resistance ends in death: “If we must die, let us die nobly” (Line 5). Black people must be courageous even though they are heavily outnumbered: “Like men, we’ll face the cowardly, murderous pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back” (Lines 13-14). This stirring call to action was prompted by the catastrophic state of race relations in America in 1919. Race riots took place that year in around 35 US cities. Most of the violence was committed by white people, but in Washington DC and Chicago, African Americans fought back, and there were deaths and injuries on both sides.

By the time “If We Must Die” was reprinted in McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows in 1922, McKay had become one of the editors of The Liberator. He had many white friends but was still subject to the indignities and insults of racial prejudice and discrimination. The biographer Cooper relates how on one occasion McKay accompanied two white friends, including another Liberator editor Max Eastman, on an automobile trip around New Jersey. In the evening, they could find no restaurant that would accept McKay’s presence. Finally, they found a restaurant that placed them in the kitchen at a table otherwise used by staff during breaks. The party of three thus shared an uncomfortable meal in that busy and noisy environment. Needless to say, it spoiled the entire day: “The hurt burned deepest on those occasions when the simplest human pleasures were spoiled by the sudden, unexpected raising of the color bar in public places” (Cooper 146).