CLAUDE MCKAY

By James Weldon Johnson

Claude McKay, although a young man, has had a remarkable, varied career. He was born in 1890 back in the hills on the island of Jamaica, British West Indies. In his teens he came to live in the city of Kingston, and enlisted in the constabulary. He began as a boy to write verses in the native dialect. In 1912, *Songs of Jamaica* was published at Kingston, and, in the same year, *Constabulary Ballads* was brought out in London. McKay became a sort of poet laureate of the Colony. His songs and poems in the soft folk speech of the Jamaican Negro became very popular. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the best of his folk poems are not incomparable with the dialect poems of Robert Burns. In the same year in which these two volumes of poems were published Mr. McKay was awarded the medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences, being the first Negro to receive the medal. It was also in 1912 that he became the recipient of a considerable sum of money to enable him to study in the United States. He came to this country and entered Tuskegee Institute, where he planned to fit himself to go back home and help his people. But the routine and discipline of that institution were not to his liking, and, after a few months, he left and went to the State Agricultural College of Kansas. The two years spent at the Kansas school taught him, at least, that he did not want to be a farmer or to teach farming, so he took the balance of his scholarship fund and made his way to New York. 1914 found Mr. McKay the proprietor of a restaurant in West 53rd Street, which was still a center of New York Negro life. In a few months his business venture failed and all his money was lost. He then took to earning his living by work in the kitchens of summer hotels and boarding houses in New England and by running as a waiter on dining-cars. During

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this period he turned again to poetry. In 1917 two sonnets appeared in The Seven Arts under the rather unpoetic name of Eli Edwards. The two poems attracted a good deal of attention; the editors themselves were curious to know who the writer was; he was found to be Claude McKay. Mr. McKay's work began to appear in other magazines. He became an associate editor of The Liberator. In 1920, *Spring in New Hampshire*, a volume of poems, was published in London, and in 1922, *Harlem Shadows*, another volume of poems, was published in New York. Late in 1922, Mr. McKay went to Russia. He has not lived in this country since. For the past four or five years he has lived in France. Recently he has again been writing, mostly prose - and what a strong and racy prose it is!

Claude McKay was one of the great forces in bringing about what is now called the "Negro literary renaissance". Those who know him and his powers feel that his comparative silence for the past four or five years has meant a great loss to that movement. He is a poet and writer of genius. It is fortunate for Negro and American literature that he is writing again.

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON