Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaica-born poet whose father passed along to his eleven children, cultural memories of the Ashanti of West Africa.  This, together with a suspicion of whites and a strong respect for the sense of community he felt in Jamaica, clearly influenced McKay’s writing. McKay arrived in the United States set to study at Tuskegee, left shortly for Kansas to study agricultural science, and finally moved to Harlem to pursue a career as a writer. He wrote and published poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography. Claude McKay worked for social change and spoke out about racism, displaying a frankness not always shared by his contemporaries.

If We Must Die

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 accused 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 deathblow!
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: Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994.