Claude McKay was a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, and radical whose work helped launch the Harlem Renaissance and connected Black writing to the international revolutionary movement. Born in rural Jamaica in 1889, he published his first two books of poetry in Jamaican patois before leaving for the United States in 1912. Working as a waiter, porter, and laborer, he met American racism head-on. In 1919, during the wave of white mob violence against Black communities known as the Red Summer, he wrote "If We Must Die," a sonnet of armed defiance that became an anthem of Black resistance.

McKay was drawn to the socialist and communist movements. He became an editor of The Liberator, the revolutionary magazine, and in London he worked on Sylvia Pankhurst's socialist newspaper Workers' Dreadnought. In 1922 he traveled to Soviet Russia and addressed the Fourth Congress of the Communist International on the oppression of Black people. He argued that Black workers were central to world revolution and pressed the international movement to take up their struggle.

His poetry collection Harlem Shadows helped open the Harlem Renaissance. His novels Home to Harlem and Banjo celebrated Black working-class life and the culture of Black dockworkers, sailors, and drifters in the port of Marseille. Banjo became an important inspiration for Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire as they developed the Négritude movement. McKay died in Chicago in 1948. His legacy endures in the revolutionary dignity of his verse and in his vision of a Black culture of resistance that crossed every border.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*