Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 43

Claude McKay is best known as a poet and writer of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay, a native of Jamaica, came to America in 1911 to earn a degree in agriculture. After transferring from the Tuskegee Institute to Kansas State College, he headed to New York in 1914 to pursue a literary career. Racial conflicts were happening more and more during that time as a response to the immigration of blacks from the South to the North. As a result there were as many as two dozen race riots that year across the country in which blacks were the victims. McKay wrote in The Liberator one of his most memorable poems, “If We Must Die,” in response to a race riot in Chicago. He charged blacks to fight back against the forces that would destroy them. McKay’s work celebrated the working class, represented blacks in America, sought to correct stereotypes prevalent in literature, and addressed political and social concerns such as racism.

Lean’tin L. Bracks