16/10/2025
There was no greater vantage point to see America burn than the Pennsylvania railroad. Working in the summer of 1919 as a dining car waiter, Claude McKay was so fearful that he had resorted to travelling with a revolver secreted in his starched white jacket. During this volatile time, which became known as the US’s Red Summer, a wave of racial violence engulfed the country.
In a situation replicated across the western world, hundreds of thousands of first world war veterans had returned home and were now looking for work. Among them were Black troops who had fought for the allied powers and hoped that they would be awarded equal rights in return for their service. It was not to be.
Competition for labour and jobs would reveal ugly prejudices and trigger a prolonged spell of rioting and lynching across the US. Between April and November 1919, hundreds of people – most of them Black Americans – were killed and thousands injured. McKay, a 28-year-old Jamaican immigrant and aspiring poet, was shaken by the violence. “It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable,” he later said. “I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter.”
The experience would prove formative to his writing. During the Red Summer riots, he wrote the impassioned sonnet If We Must Die. It was published in 1919 by the New York-based leftist publication the Liberator, which had been founded by Max Eastman and his sister, Crystal. The powerful verse, acknowledged by one contemporary as “the Marseillaise of the American Negro”, concluded with the lines, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” It established McKay, who was living in Harlem at the time, as a literary talent and after it was reprinted in the major US Black newspapers and magazines of the time, McKay was lauded as “a poet of his people”.
The long read: Economic insecurity, race riots, incendiary media … Claude McKay was one of the few Black journalists covering a turbulent period that sounds all too familiar to us today
