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Claude McKayThe Lynching
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
When Claude McKay immigrated to America in 1912, he arrived at the height of the country’s racial tension. Almost immediately, McKay experienced “extremely traumatic” and constant prejudice (Denize, Donna E. M., and Newlin, Louisa. “The Sonnet Tradition and Claude McKay.” English Journal, vol. 99, no. 1, 2009, p. 102). He first lived in the Southern state of Alabama and later moved north to Kansas and eventually New York, but in each state he was the victim of severe racial prejudice and the witness of violent racial conflicts. These conflicts escalated in 1919 with the race riots of the Red Summer. McKay and his fellow Black Americans watched helplessly as over three dozen violent conflicts between white people and Black people, many of whom were soldiers returning from WWI, broke out across the country because of the Jim Crow segregation laws. While estimates vary, many historians believe over 250 Black Americans were killed in less than a year. A number of those casualties were women and children. During these riots, white mobs also forcibly removed thousands of Black families from their homes.
This escalation in violence also saw the revival of a dark and persistent practice in the United States: lynching. Lynching of Black citizens, whether entirely innocent or charged with crimes, became increasingly common once Black slaves had been emancipated after the Civil War and often resurfaced during periods of political change and unrest. In 1919 alone, mobs of white men lynched at least 76 Black men, the highest number of such incidents in years (Denize and Newlin, p. 103). Shaken by this display of violent racism, McKay abandoned his typically lighthearted poetic style and began composing militant poems of defiance and social protest. “The Lynching,” inspired by the brutal hangings of 1919, appeared in magazines the next year.
Literary Context
Although he only lived in Harlem for a few years, McKay has always been associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Shortly after the Civil War, Black Americans escaping the reconstruction period and Jim Crow laws in the South migrated in droves to the North in hopes of better opportunities, and many of them settled in Harlem, New York. Previously a white neighborhood, Harlem quickly became the birthplace and center of African American culture. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Black writers and artists living in Harlem became invested in a “quest for an image” and “sustaining model of the kind of American the Negro might become” in the North (Keller, p. 29). Each writer involved in this Harlem Renaissance attempted to create a cohesive identity and to form a shared consciousness for a race that had been enslaved and stripped of its culture and traditions.
Important members of the Harlem Renaissance included such famous poets and writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. While these writers were united in forging a “group image for leverage to improve social conditions” (Keller, p. 33), their methodologies for achieving a Black identity varied. While some writers like Johnson were more conservative in their advocacy for social change, Langston Hughes and McKay were often much more radical in their poetry. Hughes’ poem “The South” is full of invective against the “Idiot-brained” (Line 5) and “cruel” (Line 15) Southern states that oppressed him and his race, and his poem “I Look at the World” insists that all the walls “oppression builds” (Line 9) must be torn down. His poetry regularly embraced people’s feelings of anger and at times even encouraged “violent action” (Keller, p. 31) to spark change.
Like Hughes, McKay’s poetry expressed bitterness and indignation against the treatment of his race. In poems like “Tiger” and “If We Must Die,” McKay portrays white people as vicious animals like tigers and rabid dogs. Similarly, in “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching,” McKay describes white people as “monsters” (“If We Must Die,” Line 7) and “fiendish” (“The Lynching,” Line 14) murderers. These poems, particularly “If We Must Die,” became instrumental in the fight for greater freedom for Black Americans, and the poems’ spirit of righteous anger and resistance helped to unify a scattered and disparate people.
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