McKay Claude 1889 - 1948 (59)
If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
QUOTES
He was born on September 15, 1890 in the Clarenton area of Jamaica and was the youngest of eight children. His father was a well-to-do farmer who had enough acres of land to be able to vote. Claude was influenced by his older brother and became an ardent reader of classical literature, philosophy, science and theology. He started writing his own poetry at the age of 10. As a teenager in 1906, he apprenticed with a carpenter and trained as a craftsman, but met a man, named Walter Jekyll, who became his mentor and encouraged him to focus on writing. In 1912 he left for America to attend a school in South Carolina, where he was shocked by the intense racism he encountered. He soon left South Carolina to study at Kansas State Agricultural College. In 1914 he abandoned the idea of becoming an agronomist and returned to his homeland; he moved to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart. After just six months, his wife returned to Jamaica and gave birth to their daughter. Mackay never met his child as he never returned to Jamaica.
In America for some years he worked as a waiter, at the same time he began to publish poems and short stories in magazines. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World organization and fought for self-determination of black people, in the context of the socialist revolution. In 1919, a period of intense racial violence in Anglo-American societies, he published the poem "If We Must Die" in "Liberator" magazine, urging black people to face their oppressors, retaliating for the blows they received.
From November 1922 until June 1923, he visited the Soviet Union and attended the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, where he met leading Bolsheviks, including Leon Trotski. He recorded in detail his experience in Russia in the essay "Soviet Russia and the Negroes", published in December 1923 in the corresponding issue of "The Crisis", an official organ of the National Union for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1928, he published his best-known novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Prize for Literature. With this book, he became the first black person whose book became a best seller. The novel, which depicts life on the streets of Haarlem, has had a significant impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa and Europe.
In 1944, disillusioned with communism, he turned to the Roman Catholic Church, starting to work for Catholic aid organizations in New York. He recorded his experiences in a new collection of essays, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which offers an analysis of the African-American community in Harlem at the time. On May 22, 1948, he died suddenly of a heart attack in Chicago, Illinois.