The Jamaican Renaissance

If We Must Die appeared in The Liberator in 1919. Winston Churchill quoted it to the House of Commons during the darkest days of 1940 and did not name its author — a Jamaican poet who had emigrated to the United States in 1912. The sonnet became the anthem of the New Negro movement, against the wishes of Claude McKay's more cautious peers.

Festus Claudius McKay, born September 15, 1889 in James Hill, Clarendon, was the youngest of eleven children of a peasant farmer. He apprenticed as a wheelwright and served as a sub-inspector in the Jamaica Constabulary. Walter Jekyll's patronage got the young constable his first London publication; Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads both appeared in 1912, the year he left the island. Two years at Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University followed, then a drift to New York.

Eleanor Whitlock opens in Jamaica's central highlands and follows the whole Atlantic circuit from there: the long editorial work at The Liberator and the Workers Dreadnought, the 1922 collection Harlem Shadows that established him as the major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, the Comintern's Fourth Congress in Moscow in 1923, the long European years, the interwar drifts through Marseille and Tangier and Casablanca. Home to Harlem came in 1928, the first bestseller by a Black writer in the United States. Then Banjo in 1929, the memoir A Long Way From Home in 1937, and the sociology of Harlem: Negro Metropolis in 1940.

He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1944 and died of a heart attack in Chicago on May 22, 1948, at fifty-eight. The canon kept the sonnet and mislaid the man who wrote it. Whitlock's account is of a vagrant Atlantic career that the Harlem Renaissance took eighty years to write back into its own record.