Document 21.2 Claude McKay, If We Must Die, 1919

Claude McKay | If We Must Die, 1919

Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay moved to the United States in 1912 and influenced many writers of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems focused primarily on race relations and the lives of working-class African Americans. The following poem is one of his most powerful and well-known works, written in reaction to the Red Summer of 1919.

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If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Source: Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 53.

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