Harlem Renaissance poet and writer Claude McKay was born in Jamaica, West Indies, on September 15, 1889.
Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. Consistent in his various writings is his disdain for racism and the sense that bigotry’s implicit stupidity renders its adherents pitiable as well as loathsome. As Arthur D. Drayton wrote in his essay “Claude McKay’s Human Pity”: “McKay does not seek to hide his bitterness. But having preserved his vision as poet and his status as a human being, he can transcend bitterness. In seeing ... the significance of the Negro for mankind as a whole, he is at once protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race. His human pity was the foundation that made all this possible.”
100 years ago he penned his most militant poem, titled 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 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!
If We Must Die was “published in the July issue of The Liberator. McKay wrote the poem as a response to mob attacks by white Americans upon African-American communities during Red Summer.”
Ironically, racist violence would strike on his birthday. That violence was executed by the “murderous, cowardly pack” of white supremacists known as the Ku Klux Klan.
That act of domestic terrorism (killing four young black girls attending Sunday school in Birmingham)would intensify the “fighting back” we know of today as the civil rights movement.
That heinous event on Birmingham Sunday is one in a long list of horrors visited upon black Americans since our ancestors were dragged here.
Four hundred years later, the violence, discrimination, and racism continues.
In civil rights circles, Birmingham, Alabama, was known as “Bombingham.”
Bombingham is a nickname for Birmingham, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement due to the 50 dynamite explosions that occurred in the city between 1947 and 1965. The bombings were initially used against African Americans attempting to move into neighborhoods with entirely white residents. Later, the bombings were used against anyone working towards racial desegregation in the city. One neighborhood within Birmingham experienced so many bombings it developed the nickname of Dynamite Hill.
I just re-watched Spike Lee’s award-winning 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls, which is available on multiple streaming platforms.
Reviewer Syd Slobodnik wrote:
Lee mocks the words of several city officials who called the industrialized city of Birmingham “a great place to raise a family” by showing the Klan rallies of the early 1960s. Another official referred to a predominately African American section of the city that was dubbed ‘dynamite hill”, where racist Southerners frequently tossed bombs. Birmingham was a town where 1/3 of the police force were either Klansmen or Klan affiliated. Former police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Conner was called the “dark spirit of Birmingham”because of his deep racist hatred and treatment of African Americans in the early 1960s that allowed this terrorist behavior to continue without protecting the rights of innocent people of color. Lee shows file footage of newly elected Alabama Governor Wallace’s famous inauguration speech where he proclaims“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.
All this sets the tone and atmosphere for how on September 15, 1963, the16th Street Baptist Church was bombed during Sunday school. Lee interviews various religious leaders who said this sad event was a motivator for change.Dr. King followed up his funeral services for the girls with social action. One minister notes how these events lead to the famous Selma Right to Vote Movement. And while it took nearly 14 years before the FBI and local officials charged, tried, and convicted Robert Chambliss for planting the bomb which killed the four young girls, former CBS news anchor called this tragedy “an awakening” that American now understood the horrible injustice that occurred.
Lee ends his film by warning that 22 churches in the South have been burned or bombed since 1994.
Lest you think that this tragic event which took place before some Daily Kos readers were born and has had no affect on our here-and-now politics, think again.
A key part of the victory won by Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama was the role he played in prosecuting and convicting two of the white supremacist bombers many years after the event.
Turnout by black voters, especially black women, made a difference. This was the subject of a rant from me.
I sit here looking at today’s approval ratings for the white supremacist-in-chief.
These numbers are where we stand after 400 years of black folks being here.
Amazingly and in spite of continuing oppression, black folks vote, and continue to have hope that ‘democracy’ includes us.
The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) just held a remembrance of 400 years. It has only been in existence since 1971, and with 55 members currently, the caucus is the largest it has ever been. (Note: The first three post-Reconstruction blacks in Congress came from Illinois.)
I hope that the CBC will continue to grow, that we can focus on getting new black members in vulnerable areas re-elected, and stop the efforts of some elements on the mostly white self-proclaimed ‘left’ who spend more time talking about primarying Democrats than they do fighting against white supremacist Republicans.
There is no coincidence in the fact that black voters, along with other minority groups, have been systematically disenfranchised and gerrymandered by states, and that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was gutted in 2013.
I spent last Tuesday morning watching the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties’ hearing on “Evidence of Current and Ongoing Voting Discrimination.”
Most of the House Judiciary Committee activities getting press coverage are about impeachment, and the hard work being done to reclaim voting rights is not garnering headlines.
Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, will speak to the committee about “the need for a renewed Voting Rights Act to end racial discrimination at the polls,” according to an emailed statement. Additional speakers will include:
J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel at Public Interest Legal Foundation
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Dale Ho, voting rights project director at the American Civil Liberties Union
Derrick Johnson, president and CEO at National Association for Colored People
Natalie Landreth, senior staff attorney at Native American Rights Fund
As a side note, you may have missed this travesty in the Senate:
Assessing where we, as black people, are today is difficult. I wonder, how far have we really come since the bombing of that church on that Sunday morning?
Had those four little girls survived, they would be about my age today. They would be faced with domestic white supremacist terrorism, and the restriction of civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights.
I know where the overwhelming majority of my sisters stand.
We are still fighting back.
The struggle continues.