Claude McKay

1
Claude McKay

• Jamaican born
• Transition to America
• The New Negro Movement
• Protest Poet
• Protest Sonnets

2
Jamaican Born

• Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in
  Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica on
  September 15, 1889
• His family struggled to give him the best
  education possible
• By age ten, he began to write poetry

3
Jamaican born cont.

• In 1907, an English gentleman named Walter Jekyll
  became McKays mentor
• Jekyll encouraged McKay to write dialect verse
• He had two volumes of dialect verse published,
  Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads
• His Jamaican education gave him a solid
  foundation for writing and a hunger to pursue it
  further

4
Transition to America

• McKays success in Jamaica drove him to search
  for greater opportunities in America
• In 1912, he traveled to America to study agronomy
  at Tuskegee institute
• In America, McKay faced harsh racism that he did
  not know existed
• Along with other Caribbean immigrants, McKay
  experienced shock and fear when making the
  transition to America

5
Transition to America cont.

• In America, McKay published to poems,
  Invocation and The Harlem Dancer
• He gained the recognition of Frank Harris, editor
  of Pearsons magazine and Max Eastman, editor of
  The Liberator
• McKay held a series of menial jobs, but never
  stopped writing
• The racism, lynching, and rioting that McKay
  experienced in America prompted much of his
  writing

6
The New Negro Movement

• The American New Negro Movement was based in
  Harlem, New York
• Harlem was a cultural and spiritual center for
  blacks in the 1920s
• The New Negro was a human being that shed his/her
  old stereotypes of being a minstrel or comic
  figure
• Even though McKay was not a native of Harlem, he
  is considered one of the first writers to express
  the spirit of the New Negro

7
The New Negro Movement cont.

• McKay marked the beginning of the New Negro
  movement in 1919 with his work, If We Must Die
• If We Must Die, was written in response to the
  bloody race riots in Chicago in 1919
• This poem shows that the New Negro will not
  remain passive and docile, but will fight back
  against injustices

8
Protest Poet

• McKay gained the reputation of a protest poet
• He had trouble reconciling his feelings of
  double consciousness
• double consciousness refers to McKays dual
  identities as a Jamaican and an American
• He loved America its theories, but hated the
  harsh realities that it presented

9
Protest Sonnets

• McKay spoke out about injustices through poems
  like, If We Must Die and To the White Fiends
• In If We Must Die, he compares whites to
  animals and empowers blacks by saying that Like
  men well face the murderous, cowardly pack,/
  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
• Similarly, in To the White Fiends, McKay takes
  on a philosophy of an eye for an eye Be not
  deceived, for every deed you do/ I could
  match--outmatch

10
quizshow

• McKay uses a mixture of content and form to speak
  out against injustices through his writing
• He uses harsh language like in If We Must Die
  and To the White Fiends, but his uses of the
  sonnet form also lends to his protest
• McKays use of the sonnet is his attempt to use
  the epitome of noble form in order to challenge
  the social system that created it
• He also demonstrates that as a black poet, he is
  able to adhere to the same forms as renowned
  white poets