Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World

Fig 1.

Claude McKay in London, 1920. Frontispiece to his Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, London, 1920.

Although weak, I must also do my part to keep my poor people awake and discontented.

Claude McKay, 25 February 1920

Claude McKay (1889–1948) is mainly remembered as a writer and primarily as a leading figure of the black political and cultural awakening known as the Harlem Renaissance. A distinguished and prolific poet and novelist, he was the author of what one contemporary called the 'Negro Marseillaise', the militant sonnet 'If We Must Die', which urged African Americans to fight back against their assailants and tormentors during the wave of racist mob violence that swept across the United States in 1919. His first and most famous novel, Home to Harlem, was also the first book by a black person to top the New York Times bestseller list, in 1928. Scholars of Caribbean literature applaud him especially for being the first major poet in the region to write verse in the local, creole language. Less well remembered and appreciated is McKay's engagement as a political activist, and less still, the depth and seriousness of his radicalism. The two rare documents presented below – one previously unpublished, the other published almost a century ago but never republished and almost completely unknown – provide additional evidence of his revolutionary socialist bent, capturing some key dimensions of McKay's reflections in the important years after the Russian Revolution and the Great War.

In the first document, a letter, McKay, a committed revolutionary socialist and early advocate of Bolshevism, urged Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist founder and leader of the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest black organization the world has ever known, to forge alliances with progressive whites in the common struggle against capitalism and imperialism while maintaining the autonomy and independence of the black movement. The second document, written for Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World, tells the poignant story of black (Caribbean, African and African-American) and other non-white colonial veterans of the war living in London. McKay, residing in London at the time – he lived there for more than a year, between 1919 and 1921 – highlighted the transformation in their political consciousness as a consequence of the racism they experienced while serving in the war and while living in London. The radicalization of these soldiers portended an upsurge in the anti-colonial struggle, McKay reckoned. And he was right.¹

The import of these documents extends beyond the person of Claude McKay. They capture the pain as well as the yearning and optimism of millions around the world, especially the colonial world, in the global turmoil that emerged out of the blood-soaked debris of the Great War and the aftermath of the October Revolution a century ago.

Born in Jamaica in 1889 into an uncommonly prosperous, black peasant family, McKay migrated to the US in 1912 with the intention of studying scientific agriculture before returning to work among the peasants. He started life in America as a student at the Tuskegee Institute, a black college established in Alabama by the conservative African-American leader Booker T. Washington. Hating the 'semi-military' and 'machinelike' ambience of the school, he quickly transferred to Kansas State College, where he stayed two years before dropping out and moving to Harlem.² He was never to set foot again in Jamaica and died in Chicago in 1948, after over a decade of wandering further afield, living in Europe and North Africa. A freethinker, feminist, militant rationalist and Fabian socialist from his early childhood, McKay, who had earned a reputation as a poet before leaving Jamaica, was further radicalized by the brutal racism (especially lynching) of the US he entered, the mindless slaughter of the First World War, the revolutionary ferment during and after the war, especially the outbreak of revolution in Russia, and the anti-colonial struggles sweeping the globe, especially in India and Ireland. Thus, by the time he reached...